Robert Mitchum

His older sister, Annette (known as Julie Mitchum during her acting career), was born in 1914.

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.

Robert Charles Durman Mitchum was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on August 6, 1917, into a Methodist family of Scots-Irish, Native American, and Norwegian descent.

His father, James Thomas Mitchum, a shipyard and railroad worker, was of Scottish-Irish and Native American descent, and his mother, Ann Harriet Gunderson, was a Norwegian immigrant and sea captain's daughter.

James was crushed to death in a railyard accident in Charleston, South Carolina, in February 1919.

His widow, Ann, was pregnant at the time, and was awarded a government pension.

She returned to Connecticut after staying for some time in her husband's hometown of Lane, South Carolina.

Her third child, John, was born in September 1919.

When all of the children were old enough to attend school, Ann found employment as a linotype operator for the Bridgeport Post.

She married Lieutenant Hugh "The Major" Cunningham Morris, a former Royal Naval Reserve officer.

In 1926, his mother sent him and his younger brother to live with her parents on a farm near Woodside, Delaware.

He attended Felton High School, where he was expelled for mischief.

During his years at the Felton school, he ran away from home for the first time at age 11.

They had a daughter, Carol Morris, born c. 1928 on the family farm in Delaware.

As a child, Mitchum was known as a prankster, often involved in fistfights and mischief.

In 1929, Mitchum and his younger brother were sent to Philadelphia to live with their older sister, Julie, who had started her career as a performer in vaudeville acts on the East Coast.

The following year, he and the rest of the family moved to New York with Julie, sharing an apartment in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen with her and her husband.

Mitchum attended Haaren High School but was eventually expelled.

Mitchum left home at age 14 and traveled throughout the country, hopping freight cars and taking a number of jobs, including ditch-digging for the Civilian Conservation Corps and professional boxing.

In the mid-1930s Julie Mitchum moved to the West Coast in the hope of acting in movies, and the rest of the Mitchum family soon followed her to Long Beach, California.

In summer 1933, he was arrested for vagrancy in Savannah, Georgia and put in a local chain gang.

By Mitchum's account, he escaped and hitchhiked to Rising Sun, Delaware, where his family had moved.

That fall, at age 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.

Robert arrived in 1936.

During this time, Mitchum worked as a ghostwriter for astrologer Carroll Righter.

Julie persuaded him to join the local theater guild with her.

At The Players Guild of Long Beach, Mitchum worked as a stagehand and occasional bit-player in company productions.

He also wrote several short pieces which were performed by the guild.

According to Lee Server's biography, Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care, Mitchum put his talent for poetry to work writing song lyrics and monologues for Julie's nightclub performances.

In 1940, he returned to Delaware to marry Dorothy Spence, and they moved back to California.

Mitchum 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 Out of the Past (1947), Angel Face (1953), River of No Return (1954), The Night of the Hunter (1955), Thunder Road (1958), The Sundowners (1960), Cape Fear (1962), El Dorado, (1966), Ryan's Daughter (1970), The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), and Farewell, My Lovely (1975).

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).

Film critic 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."

David Thomson wrote: "Since the war, no American actor has made more first-class films, in so many different moods."

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.