Robert Charles Durman Mitchum (August 6, 1917 – July 1, 1997) was an American film actor, director, author, poet, composer, and singer. Mitchum rose to prominence for his starring roles in several classic films noir, and is generally considered a forerunner of the antiheroes prevalent in film during the 1950s and 1960s. His best-known films include Out of the Past (1947), The Night of the Hunter (1955), and Cape Fear (1962). Mitchum was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Story of G.I. Joe (1945).
Mitchum is rated number 23 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest male stars of Classic American Cinema.
Robert Mitchum was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1917 into a Norwegian-Irish Methodist family. His mother Ann Harriet Gunderson was a Norwegian immigrant and sea captain's daughter; his father James Thomas Mitchum was a shipyard and railroad worker of Irish descent. His older sister, Annette (known as Julie Mitchum during her acting career), was born in 1914. Their father James Mitchum was crushed to death in a railyard accident in Charleston, South Carolina in February 1919, when Robert was less than two years old and Annette was not yet five. Their mother was awarded a government pension; she soon realized she was pregnant; her and James' second son John was born in September of that year. Ann married again, to Major Hugh Cunningham Morris, a former Royal Naval Reserve officer. He helped care for her three children. Ann and Morris also had a daughter together, 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.