Mitchum, Robert (Charles Duran) (1917-1997)

US film actor. His career spanned more than 50 years of film-making, and embraced more than 100 film and television roles. As one of Hollywood's most enduring stars, he was equally at home as the relaxed modern hero or psychopathic villain. Mitchum's hard-boiled performances in a series of war films, melodramas, films noirs, and Westerns of the 1940s and early 1950s established him firmly in the pantheon of Hollywood's leading male performers. His films include Out of the Past (1947), The Night of the Hunter (1955), and The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973).

His film career began in 1942 with Leather Burners, but was confined primarily to B-movies, including eight roles in Hopalong Cassidy Westerns. This all changed with his acclaimed performance in The Story of G I Joe (1945), which brought him to the attention of a wider audience, earning him his only Academy Award nomination. Mitchum's subsequent career was prolific if not exactly littered with a string of cinema classics. While there were many highpoints, foremost among them is his turn as Jeff Bailey, the definitive noir protagonist, in Out of the Past and his gleefully evil psychopaths in The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Cape Fear (1962). His lengthy filmography was generally characterized by run-of-the-mill fare in which his undoubted qualities as an actor invariably shone through. Among his other films are The Lusty Men (1952), Angel Face (1952), and Farewell, My Lovely (1975), in which he played Raymond Chandler's world-weary private investigator, Philip Marlowe. In his later years, Mitchum alternated film work and television work, including the mini serials The Winds of War (1983) and War and Remembrance (1988). He put in a few film appearances in the mid-1990s, most notably Jim Jarmusch's quirky Western Dead Man (1995).