Robert Mitchum Interview (April 15, 1978)

Robert Charles Durman Mitchum (August 6, 1917 - July 1, 1997) was an American actor. He is known for his antihero roles and film noir appearances. He received nominations for an Academy Award, and a BAFTA Award. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1984 and the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1992. Mitchum is rated number 23 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest male stars of classic American cinema.[1]
He rose to prominence with an Academy Award nomination for the Best Supporting Actor for The Story of G.I. Joe (1945). His best-known films include Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), Out of the Past (1947), River of No Return (1954), The Night of the Hunter (1955), Thunder Road (1958), Cape Fear (1962), El Dorado (1966), Ryan's Daughter (1970) and The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973). He is also known for his television role as U.S. Navy Captain Victor "Pug" Henry in the epic miniseries The Winds of War (1983) and sequel War and Remembrance (1988).
Roger Ebert called Mitchum his favorite movie star and the soul of film noir: "With his deep, laconic voice and his long face and those famous weary eyes, he was the kind of guy you'd picture in a saloon at closing time, waiting for someone to walk in through the door and break his heart."[2] David Thomson wrote that "Since the war, no American actor has made so many different first-class films, in so many different moods."[3]
Early life[edit]
Mitchum in 1946
Mitchum was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on August 6, 1917, into a Methodist family of English-Scottish-Irish and Norwegian descent.[4] His father, James Thomas Mitchum, a shipyard and railroad worker, was of English-Scottish-Irish descent,[5] and his mother, Ann Harriet Gunderson, was a Norwegian immigrant and sea captain's daughter. His older sister, Annette (known as Julie Mitchum during her acting career), was born in 1914. James was crushed to death in a railyard accident in Charleston, South Carolina, in February 1919. His widow was awarded a government pension, and soon realized she was pregnant. Her third child, John, was born in September of that year.
Ann married Lieutenant Hugh "The Major" Cunningham Morris, a former Royal Naval Reserve officer. They had a daughter, Carol Morris, born July 1927 on the family farm in Delaware. When all of the children were old enough to attend school, Ann found employment as a linotype operator for the Bridgeport Post.[6]
As a child, Mitchum was known as a prankster, often involved in fistfights and mischief. In 1929 his mother sent the twelve-year-old Mitchum to live with her parents in Felton, Delaware; the boy was promptly expelled from middle school for scuffling with the principal. A year later he moved in with his older sister in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen. After being expelled from Haaren High School he left his sister and traveled throughout the country, hopping freight cars[7] and taking a number of jobs, including ditch-digging for the Civilian Conservation Corps and professional boxing. He later stated that at age 14 in Savannah, Georgia, he was arrested for vagrancy and put in a local chain gang.[7] By Mitchum's account, he escaped and returned to his family in Delaware. At the age of 16, while recovering from injuries that nearly cost him a leg, he met 14 year old Dorothy Spence, whom he would later marry. He soon went back on the road, eventually "riding the rails" to California.