Robert Mitchum

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.

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), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison  (1957), 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."

Early life


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 Scots-Irish and Native American descent, 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. 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. 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 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. 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, fruit picking, and dishwashing. In the summer of 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.

Mitchum worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps for a few months, digging ditches and planting trees, before going back on the road in July 1934. He headed for Long Beach, California, where his older sister had moved with her husband. The rest of the family soon also arrived and moved in with Julie. For the next three years, Mitchum continued traveling across the country and taking various jobs. He participated in 27 professional boxing matches but retired from the ring after a fight that broke his nose and left a scar on his left eye.

Getting established


By 1937, Mitchum had settled in Long Beach, California. His older sister, Julie, tried to return to show business and became a member of the Players Guild, a local theater group. She suggested that he also join the group. Mitchum made his stage debut for the Players Guild in August 1937 and continued appearing in their productions, also writing two children's plays. After Julie began working as a cabaret singer, he started writing lyrics for her and other performers. In 1939, he wrote and composed an oratorio that was presented at a Jewish-refugee-benefit show, produced and directed by Orson Welles.

In late 1939, Mitchum was hired by astrologer Carroll Righter as an assistant for an Eastern Seaboard tour. He returned to Delaware to marry Dorothy Spence in 1940 during this trip and then moved back to California with her. He quit his work as a writer for cabaret acts after a promised payment failed to materialize. Intending to provide a steady income for his family after his wife became pregnant, Mitchum took a job as a sheet metal worker at the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation during World War II. He acted part-time for a while, and his last stage appearance before his entrance into films was in 1941. The noise of the machinery at Lockheed damaged his hearing. Assigned to a graveyard shift, he suffered from chronic insomnia and went temporarily blind. Told by his doctors that his illness was caused by job-related anxieties, he left Lockheed.

Mitchum then sought work as a film actor. His agent got him an interview with Harry Sherman, the producer of United Artists' Hopalong Cassidy Western film series, which starred William Boyd. In June 1942, Mitchum began his film career with a part as a minor villain in Border Patrol, the first of seven Hopalong Cassidy films he made that were released in 1943. That year, he appeared in a total of 19 films. His first non-Western was Follow the Band, a musical at Universal, and he went uncredited as a soldier in The Human Comedy, a major MGM picture starring Mickey Rooney. Other films in which he played supporting parts included a Laurel and Hardy comedy, The Dancing Masters, and two war films starring Randolph Scott, Corvette K-225 and Gung Ho!. Harry Cohn offered him a studio contract after viewing his performance in Columbia's musical Doughboys in Ireland. Mitchum, however, declined the offer.

Mitchum's first important role was in When Strangers Marry, a thriller directed by William Castle and released by Monogram in 1944. Starring opposite Dean Jagger and Kim Hunter, he played a salesman who helps his former girlfriend solve a murder mystery. Mitchum received positive reviews for his performance, and in retrospect, the film is considered as a fine example of B movies. In the same year, he was cast in a small role in the war film Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, starring Van Johnson and Robert Walker and featuring Spencer Tracy in a guest performance. Director Mervyn LeRoy was impressed by Mitchum's talent and recommended him to RKO.

On May 25, 1944, Mitchum signed a seven-year contract with RKO at an initial salary of $350 per week, effective June 1. David O. Selznick's Vanguard Films bought a piece of the contract. Mitchum's first film for RKO was Girl Rush (1944), a comedy starring Brown and Carney. He was groomed for B-Western stardom in two Zane Grey adaptations, Nevada (1944) and West of the Pecos (1945), with the former marking his first time receiving star billing. Both films did well at the box office and received positive reviews from critics.

Following the filming of the two Westerns, RKO lent Mitchum to independent producer Lester Cowan for a prominent supporting actor role in The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), directed by William A. Wellman. In the film, he portrayed war-weary officer Bill Walker, based on Captain Henry T. Waskow, who remains resolute despite the troubles he faces. The film, which followed the life of an ordinary soldier through the eyes of journalist Ernie Pyle, played by Burgess Meredith, became an instant critical and commercial success. General Dwight D. Eisenhower called it the greatest war picture he had ever seen. Before its release, Mitchum was drafted into the United States Army, serving at Fort MacArthur, California, as a medic. At the 1946 Academy Awards, The Story of G.I. Joe was nominated for four Oscars, including Mitchum's only nomination for an Academy Award, for Best Supporting Actor. The film established Mitchum as a star, and nearly three decades later, Andrew Sarris described his performance as "extraordinarily haunting" in The Village Voice.

Mitchum's next film was Till the End of Time, a story of returning Marine veterans, directed by Edward Dmytryk and costarring Dorothy McGuire and Guy Madison. It was a box office success. He then migrated to a genre that came to define his career and screen persona: film noir.

Film noir


Mitchum ultimately became best known for his work in film noir. He was cast as the second lead in two noirs in 1946. On a loan-out to MGM, he costarred with Katharine Hepburn and Robert Taylor in Vincente Minnelli's Undercurrent, playing a troubled, sensitive man entangled in the affairs of his tycoon brother and his brother's suspicious wife. At RKO, he appeared in John Brahm's The Locket, playing a bitter ex-boyfriend to Laraine Day's femme fatale. The latter, noted for its use of multi-layered flashbacks, has become a cult classic.

Mitchum's career took a significant turn in 1947. He was loaned to Warner Bros. for Raoul Walsh's Pursued, costarring Teresa Wright, playing a character who attempts to recall his past and find those responsible for killing his family. It was his first high-budget Western and is generally considered as the first noir Western in American cinema. Crossfire featured Mitchum as a member of a group of returned World War II soldiers embroiled in a murder investigation for an act committed by an anti-semite in their ranks. The film, directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Robert Young, Mitchum, and Robert Ryan, was RKO's most profitable film of 1947 and earned five Academy Award nominations. Desire Me, a loan-out to MGM, costarring Greer Garson, was Mitchum's least successful film of the year. A troubled production and box office disaster, it is often cited as the first major Hollywood film released without a credited director.

Following the success of Pursued and Crossfire, Mitchum was signed to a new seven-year contract with RKO and David O. Selznick, which immediately increased his salary from $1,500 to $3,000 per week. He rounded out 1947 with Out of the Past (also called Build My Gallows High), which is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all films noir. Directed by Jacques Tourneur, costarring Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas, and featuring the cinematography of Nicholas Musuraca, the picture featured Mitchum in his best-known noir role, Jeff Markham, a small-town gas-station owner and former investigator whose unfinished business with a gambler and a femme fatale comes back to haunt him.

On September 1, 1948, during the rise of his career, Mitchum was arrested for possession of marijuana with actress Lila Leeds. He served for 50 days, split between the Los Angeles County Jail and a Castaic, California, prison farm, and was released on March 30, 1949. Life photographers were permitted to take photos of him mopping up in his prison uniform. He later told reporters that jail was "like Palm Springs, but without the riff-raff." Mitchum's conviction was later overturned by the Los Angeles court and district attorney's office on January 31, 1951, after being exposed as a setup.

Despite Mitchum's legal troubles, his popularity was not harmed. His upcoming film, Rachel and the Stranger, was rushed into release to take advantage of the publicity surrounding the arrest and became one of RKO's top grossers of 1948. Costarring with Loretta Young and William Holden, he played a mountain man competing for the hand of the indentured servant and wife of a recent widower. In the same year, he appeared in Robert Wise's noir Western Blood on the Moon with Barbara Bel Geddes, playing a cowboy caught in a conflict between cattle owners and homesteaders. His performance received rave reviews, with critics noting his screen image as a quiet yet menacing drifter and pointing out that his presence enhanced the film's quality.

Mitchum starred in three films in 1949. The Red Pony, the film adaptation of John Steinbeck's novella, directed by Lewis Milestone and costarring Myrna Loy, was his first color film, in which he appeared as a trusted cowhand to a ranching family. In The Big Steal, an early Don Siegel film, he returned to film noir in a reunion with Jane Greer, playing an army lieutenant who chases a thief with the help of the thief's fiancée. It was a box office success. He was then cast against type in the romantic comedy Holiday Affair opposite Janet Leigh. Although the film failed at the box office at the time, it is now identified as a Christmas classic with annual showings on television.

By the end of the 1940s, Mitchum had become RKO's biggest star. Before the filming of Holiday Affair, RKO studio head Howard Hughes bought Selznick's share of his contract for $400,000.

Mainstream stardom in the 1950s and 1960s


Mitchum appeared in a string of film noirs in the early 1950s. In Where Danger Lives (1950), he played a doctor who comes between a mentally unbalanced Faith Domergue and a cuckolded Claude Rains. The film received mixed reviews from critics. He and Ava Gardner played star-crossed lovers in My Forbidden Past (1951), a box office flop. The script was so disappointing that he publicly complained about it during the making of the film. The next three films he starred in were all troubled productions with extensive reshooting. A mixture of noir and comedy, His Kind of Woman (1951) paired Mitchum for the first time with Jane Russell, RKO's top female star at the time. The Racket was a noir remake of the 1928 silent crime drama of the same name, and featured him as a police captain fighting corruption in his precinct. Josef von Sternberg's Macao (1952) reunited him with Russell and cast him as a victim of mistaken identity at an exotic resort casino. While The Racket was one of RKO's most successful films of 1951, both His Kind of Woman and Macao cost so much that they lost money.

In 1952, following the Korean War drama One Minute to Zero with Ann Blyth, which was one of RKO's biggest pictures of the year, Mitchum returned to the Western genre. He starred as a veteran rodeo champion in The Lusty Men, directed by Nicholas Ray and costarring Susan Hayward and Arthur Kennedy. His performance was lauded by critics, with Variety and The Hollywood Reporter calling it his best to date. Manny Farber wrote in The Nation, "Mitchum is the most convincing cowboy I've seen in horse opry, meeting every situation with the lonely, distant calm of a master cliché-dodger."

In 1953, Mitchum starred in Otto Preminger's noir classic Angel Face, the first of his three films with Jean Simmons. He played an ambulance driver who allows a murderously insane heiress to fatally seduce him. Jean-Luc Godard named the film as one of the best ten American sound pictures. In a retrospective review in 2010, Richard Brody wrote in The New Yorker that "the ever-cool Mitchum radiates heat without warmth."

In exchange for Hayward's appearance in The Lusty Men, Mitchum was loaned to 20th Century Fox for White Witch Doctor (1953) opposite Hayward, playing a hunter who falls in love with a nurse in Africa. Although director Henry Hathaway was impressed by Mitchum's performance, the critics were not. Back at RKO, Mitchum appeared in the studio's first 3-D production, Second Chance (also 1953), playing a boxer whose girlfriend is trailed by a mobster in Mexico. The film, directed by Rudolph Maté and costarring Linda Darnell and Jack Palance, was a box office success and received positive reviews, particularly for its cable car sequence at the end.

In 1954, Mitchum reteamed with Simmons in She Couldn't Say No, his last film to be released by RKO. It was often considered the studio's failed attempt to revive the screwball genre. That same year, he was loaned out for two films. At 20th Century Fox, he costarred with Marilyn Monroe in Preminger's Western River of No Return, which was a box office hit. In William A. Wellman's psychological drama Track of the Cat for Wayne/Fellows Productions, John Wayne's independent production company, he played the bullying brother of Teresa Wright and Tab Hunter. Mitchum recalled the film, which was shot in the deep snow at Mount Rainier, as his toughest location shooting experience. The film was not a success on release, which Wellman described in his autobiography as "a flop artistically, financially and Wellmanly." However, it was later reevaluated and regarded as a unique masterpiece by some critics. In 1998, Jonathan Rosenbaum included Track of the Cat in his alternative list of the 100 greatest American films.

Mitchum left RKO after his contract expired on August 15, 1954. The following year, he appeared in The Night of the Hunter (1955), Charles Laughton's only film as director. Based on a novel by Davis Grubb, the noir thriller starred Mitchum as a serial killer posing as a preacher to find money hidden by his cellmate in the man's home. His performance as Reverend Harry Powell is considered by many to be one of the best of his career. Stanley Kramer's melodrama Not as a Stranger, also released in 1955, starred Mitchum against type as an idealistic young doctor who marries an older nurse (Olivia de Havilland), only to question his morality many years later. The film was a box-office hit, but critical reactions were mixed, with film critic Leslie Halliwell pointing out that all of the actors were too old for their characters.

Mitchum was fired from Blood Alley (1955) over his conduct, reportedly having thrown the film's transportation manager into San Francisco Bay. According to Sam O'Steen's memoir Cut to the Chase, Mitchum showed up on-set after a night of drinking and tore apart a studio office when they did not have a car ready for him. He walked off the set of the third day of filming, claiming he could not work with the director. Because Mitchum was showing up late and behaving erratically, producer John Wayne, after failing to obtain Humphrey Bogart as a replacement, took over the role himself.

On March 8, 1955, Mitchum formed DRM (Dorothy and Robert Mitchum) Productions to produce five films for United Artists; four ultimately were produced. The first film was Bandido (1956). Following a succession of average Westerns and the poorly received noir Foreign Intrigue (1956), Mitchum starred in the first of three theatrical films with Deborah Kerr. The John Huston World War II drama Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison cast Mitchum as a Marine corporal stranded on a Pacific Island with a nun, Sister Angela (Kerr), as his sole companion for the first part of the movie, until Japanese soldiers arrive and establish a base. In this character study, they struggle with the elements, the garrison, and their growing feelings for one another. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards, including Best Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay. For his role, Mitchum was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actor. In the World War II submarine film The Enemy Below (1956), Mitchum played the captain of a US Navy destroyer who matches wits with a wily German U-boat skipper, portrayed by Curt Jurgens; both men would also appear in the 1962 World War II epic The Longest Day.

Thunder Road (1958), the second DRM Production, was loosely based on an incident in which a driver transporting moonshine was said to have fatally crashed on Kingston Pike in Knoxville, Tennessee, somewhere between Bearden Hill and Morrell Road. According to Metro Pulse writer Jack Renfro, the incident occurred in 1952 and may have been witnessed by James Agee, who passed the story on to Mitchum. He starred, produced, co-wrote the screenplay, and is rumored to have directed much of the film. It costars his son James as his younger brother. Mitchum also co-wrote (with Don Raye) the theme song, "The Ballad of Thunder Road."

Mitchum returned to Mexico for The Wonderful Country (1959) with Julie London, and Ireland for A Terrible Beauty/The Night Fighters for the last of his DRM Productions.

Mitchum and Kerr reunited for the Fred Zinnemann film The Sundowners (1960), playing an Australian husband and wife struggling in the sheep industry during the Depression. The film received five Oscar nominations, and Mitchum earned the year's National Board of Review award for Best Actor for his performance. The award also recognized his performance in the Vincente Minnelli rural drama Home from the Hill (also 1960). He was teamed with former leading ladies Kerr and Simmons, as well as Cary Grant, for the Stanley Donen comedy The Grass Is Greener the same year.

Mitchum's performance as the menacing rapist Max Cady in the 1962 thriller Cape Fear brought him further renown for playing cold, predatory characters. The film, however, was not a box office success. The 1960s were marked by a number of lesser films. He was one of the all-star husbands of Shirley MacLaine in the comedy What a Way to Go! (1964), the drunken sheriff in the Howard Hawks Western El Dorado (1967), a quasi-remake of Rio Bravo (1959), and the World War II epic Anzio (1968). He co-starred with Dean Martin in the 1968 Western 5 Card Stud, again playing a homicidal preacher.

Mitchum turned down The Wild Bunch partially because he did not want to work with Sam Peckinpah.

1970s


Mitchum made a departure from his typical screen persona with the 1970 David Lean film Ryan's Daughter, in which he starred as Charles Shaughnessy, a mild-mannered schoolmaster in World War I–era Ireland. At the time of filming, Mitchum was considering retiring from acting and was also concerned about the film's demanding schedule. He initially turned down the script but eventually accepted the role after screenwriter Robert Bolt approached him again. Though the film was nominated for four Academy Awards (winning two) and Mitchum was much publicized as a contender for a Best Actor nomination, he was not nominated. George C. Scott won the award for his powerful performance in Patton, a project Mitchum had rejected. Mitchum said that Patton and Dirty Harry, another picture he turned down, were movies he would not do for any amount of money because he disagreed with the morality of the scripts.

The 1970s featured Mitchum mainly in crime dramas, to mixed result. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) had the actor playing an aging Boston hoodlum caught between the Feds and his criminal friends. Sydney Pollack's The Yakuza (1974) transplanted the typical film noir story arc to the Japanese underworld. Mitchum's stint as an aging Philip Marlowe in the Raymond Chandler adaptation Farewell, My Lovely (1975) (a remake of 1944's Murder, My Sweet) was sufficiently well received by audiences and critics for him to reprise the role in 1978's The Big Sleep, a remake of the 1946 film of the same title.

Mitchum also appeared in 1976's Midway about the crucial World War II naval battle.

Later work
In 1982, Mitchum played Coach Delaney in the film adaptation of playwright/actor Jason Miller's 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning play That Championship Season.

Mitchum starred in the 1983 miniseries The Winds of War, based on a Herman Wouk book of the same title. The big-budget production aired on ABC, starring Mitchum as naval officer "Pug" Henry and Victoria Tennant as Pamela Tudsbury, and examined the events leading up to America's involvement in World War II. It was watched by 140 million people over seven days and became the most-watched miniseries up to that point. He returned to the role in the 1988 sequel miniseries War and Remembrance, which continued the story through the end of the war.

In 1984, Mitchum entered the Betty Ford Center in Palm Springs, California, for treatment of alcoholism.

He played George Hazard's father-in-law in the 1985 miniseries North and South, which also aired on ABC.



Mitchum starred opposite Wilford Brimley in the 1986 made-for-TV movie Thompson's Run.

In 1987, Mitchum was the guest host on Saturday Night Live, where he played private eye Philip Marlowe for the last time in the parody sketch "Death Be Not Deadly." The show ran a short comedy film he made (written and directed by his daughter, Petrine) called Out of Gas, a mock sequel to Out of the Past (Jane Greer reprised her role from the original film). He also was in Richard Donner's 1988 comedy Scrooged.

In 1991, Mitchum was set to receive a lifetime achievement award from the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures. He rejected it, however, after learning that he would have to pay for his own transport and accommodations and accept it in person. That same year, he received the Telegatto award and, in 1992 the Cecil B. DeMille Award from the Golden Globe Awards.

Mitchum continued to appear in films until the mid-1990s, such as Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, and he narrated the Western Tombstone. Though he portrayed the antagonist in the original, he played the protagonist police detective in Martin Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear, but the actor gradually slowed his workload. His last film appearance was a small but pivotal role in the television biographical film James Dean: Race with Destiny, playing Giant director George Stevens. Mitchum's last starring role was in the 1995 Norwegian movie Pakten.

Music
One of the lesser-known aspects of Mitchum's career was his foray into music as a singer. Critic Greg Adams writes, "Unlike most celebrity vocalists, Robert Mitchum actually had musical talent." Frank Sinatra said of Mitchum, "For anyone who's not a professional musician, he knows more about music, from Bach to Brubeck, than any man I've ever known."

Mitchum's voice was often used instead of that of a professional singer when his character sang in his films. Notable productions featuring Mitchum's own singing voice included Pursued, Rachel and the Stranger, The Night of the Hunter, and The Sundowners. He sang the title song to the Western Young Billy Young, made in 1969.

Mitchum recorded two albums. After hearing traditional calypso music and meeting artists such as Mighty Sparrow and Lord Invader while filming Fire Down Below and Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison in the Caribbean islands of Tobago, he recorded Calypso – is like so ... in March 1957. On the album, released through Capitol Records, he emulated the calypso sound and style, even adopting the style's unique pronunciations and slang. A year later, he recorded "The Ballad of Thunder Road", a song he had written for the film Thunder Road. The country-style song became a modest hit for Mitchum, reaching number 62 on the Billboard Pop Singles chart in September 1958. The song was included as a bonus track on a successful reissue of Calypso ... and helped market the film to a wider audience.

Although Mitchum continued to use his singing voice in his film work, he waited until 1967 to record his follow-up record, That Man, Robert Mitchum, Sings. The album, released by Nashville-based Monument Records, took him further into country music and featured songs similar to "The Ballad of Thunder Road". "Little Old Wine Drinker Me", the first single, was a top-10 hit on country radio, reaching number nine there, and crossed over into mainstream radio, where it peaked at number 96. Its follow-up, "You Deserve Each Other", also charted on the Billboard Country Singles chart. Mitchum was nominated for an Academy of Country Music Award for Most Promising Male Vocalist in 1968.

Marriage and family
In the fall of 1933, at the age of 16, Mitchum met his future wife, 14-year-old Dorothy Spence, at a swimming hole near Camden, Delaware. She was a schoolmate of his younger brother, John, whom she had briefly dated. Mitchum immediately fell for her, and the two had begun a serious relationship by the time he left for California in 1934. Meanwhile, she continued attending school in Delaware and then went to college in Philadelphia.

Mitchum married Dorothy on March 16, 1940, in the kitchen of a Methodist parson in Dover, Delaware. He brought her to Los Angeles to settle down, where he took a job at the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation before finding work as a film actor in June 1942. The couple had three children: sons, James (born May 8, 1941) and Christopher (born October 16, 1943), both actors; and a daughter, Petrine (born March 3, 1952), a writer.

Despite his reported affairs with other women, including author Edna O'Brien and actresses Lucille Ball, Ava Gardner, Jean Simmons, Shirley MacLaine, and Sarah Miles, Mitchum and wife Dorothy remained together until his death in 1997. He told journalist Don Short in a 1977 interview: "Not as though there has been anyone else in my life except Dorothy. There's not one of 'em—and I've met the best of 'em—worth lighting a candle for alongside her."

Mitchum's grandson Bentley Mitchum is an actor. His great-granddaughter Grace Van Dien is an actress.

Friendships
Mitchum's close friends included Jane Russell, his neighbor in Santa Barbara, California; and Deborah Kerr, his favorite costar.

Political views
Mitchum was a Republican who campaigned for Barry Goldwater in the 1964 United States presidential election, and considered him to be the only honest politician. Mitchum supported Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George H. W. Bush in 1992, narrating a promotional film for the latter that played at the Republican National Convention.

Religion
Although he was born into a Methodist family and later married by a Methodist parson, Mitchum was non-religious.

Death
A lifelong heavy smoker, Mitchum died in his sleep at 5 a.m. on July 1, 1997, at his home in Santa Barbara, California, from complications of lung cancer and emphysema. His wife of 57 years, Dorothy, was by his side.

Mitchum's body was cremated and, on July 6, his ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean off the coast near his home. The private ceremony was attended by only his family members and his longtime friend Jane Russell. There is a cenotaph to him in his wife's family plot at the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Camden, Delaware. Dorothy died in 2014 (May 2, 1919, Camden, Delaware – April 12, 2014, Santa Barbara, California), aged 94. In accordance with their wishes, her ashes were also scattered at sea so that they could be symbolically reunited at Easter Island.

Controversies
At the 1982 premiere for That Championship Season, an intoxicated Mitchum assaulted a female reporter and threw a basketball that he was holding (a prop from the film) at a female photographer from Time magazine, causing a neck injury and knocking out two of her teeth. She sued him for $30 million in damages. The suit eventually "cost him his salary from the film".

Mitchum's role in That Championship Season may have indirectly contributed to another incident several months later. In a February 1983 Esquire interview, he made statements that some construed as racist, antisemitic, and sexist. When asked if the Holocaust had occurred, Mitchum responded, "so the Jews say." Following the widespread negative response, he apologized a month later, saying that his statements were "prankish" and "foreign to my principle." He claimed that the problem had begun when he recited a purportedly racist monologue from his role in That Championship Season and the reporter believed that the words were Mitchum's. He claimed that he had only reluctantly agreed to the interview and then proceeded to "string... along" the reporter with his statements.

Reception, acting style, and legacy
Mitchum is regarded by some critics as one of the finest actors of the Golden Age of Hollywood. David Thomson hailed Mitchum as one of the three "most important actors in film history" along with Cary Grant and Barbara Stanwyck. Appraising Mitchum’s career, Thomson wrote: "Since the war, no American actor has made more first-class films, in so many different moods." Roger Ebert wrote: "Robert Mitchum was my favorite movie star because he represented, for me, the impenetrable mystery of the movies. He knew the inside story. 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. Mitchum was the soul of film noir."

Mitchum, however, was self-effacing; in an interview with Barry Norman for the BBC about his contribution to cinema, Mitchum stopped Norman in mid-flow and in his typical nonchalant style, said, "Look, I have two kinds of acting. One on a horse and one off a horse. That's it." He had also succeeded in annoying some of his fellow actors by voicing his puzzlement at those who viewed the profession as challenging and hard work. He possessed a photographic memory that allowed him to remember lines with relative ease, and was also known for his proficiency with accents.

Director Robert Wise recalled that during the shooting of Blood on the Moon, Mitchum would mark his script with the letters "NAR," which meant "no action required." He told Wise that he did not need a line and would give Wise a look instead. Dismissive of Method acting, when asked by George Peppard if he had studied it during filming of Home from the Hill, Mitchum jokingly responded that he had studied the "Smirnoff method".

Mitchum's subtle and understated acting style sometimes garnered him criticism of sleepwalking through his performances in the early stage of his career. In his contemporary review of Out of the Past, James Agee commented that Mitchum's "curious languor" in love scenes suggested "Bing Crosby supersaturated with barbiturates." The review of Where Danger Lives in the Monthly Film Bulletin in 1951 said, "Robert Mitchum performs somnambulistically." David Thomson noticed that Mitchum "began to attract respectable attention" around the late 1950s. Writing for the Village Voice in 1973, Andrew Sarris pointed out that Mitchum, with his stoic presence on the screen that was "mistaken for a stone face without feelings," had been "grossly maligned as an actor," while he was actually "reborn in every movie, recreated in every relationship."

Mitchum had a solid reputation among the directors who worked with him. William A. Wellman thought Mitchum should have won the Academy Award for The Story of G.I. Joe and called him "one of the finest, most solid and real actors" in the world. Raoul Walsh recalled that Mitchum had impressed him as being "one of the finest natural actors" he had ever met. Charles Laughton, who directed him in The Night of the Hunter, considered him to be one of the best actors in the world and believed that he would have been the greatest Macbeth. John Huston felt that Mitchum was on the same pedestal of actors such as Marlon Brando, Richard Burton and Laurence Olivier. Vincente Minnelli wrote that few actors he had worked with brought "so much of themselves to a picture," and none did it "with such total lack of affectation" as he did. Howard Hawks praised Mitchum for being a hard worker, labeling the actor a "fraud" for pretending to not care about acting. David Lean said of him: "He is a master of stillness. Other actors act. Mitchum is. He has true delicacy and expressiveness, but his forte is his indelible identity. Simply by being there, Mitchum can make almost any other actor look like a hole in the screen."

Mitchum's close friend and co-star on four movies, Deborah Kerr, commented on his acting abilities: "He makes acting seem like it's absolutely real. There's no acting to it at all. It's like falling off a log for him." Jane Greer, his co-star in Out of the Past and The Big Steal, said of him: "Bob would never be caught acting. He just is."

Robert De Niro, Clint Eastwood, Michael Madsen, and Mark Rylance have cited Mitchum as one of their favorite actors.

AFI's 100 Years...100 Stars ranked Mitchum as the 23rd-greatest male star of classic Hollywood cinema. AFI also recognized Max Cady and Reverend Harry Powell as the 28th and 29th greatest screen villains of all time in AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains.

For his contribution to the film industry, Mitchum has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6240 Hollywood Boulevard. He was posthumously inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in 2013.

Mitchum provided the voice of the famous American Beef Council commercials that touted "Beef ... it's what's for dinner", from 1992 until his death.

A "Mitchum's Steakhouse" operated in Trappe, Maryland, where Mitchum and his family lived from 1959 to 1965.

On December 10, 2022, a historical marker commemorating Mitchum was unveiled in his father's hometown of Lane, South Carolina.