Robert Mitchum

• 1. Introduction

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  Robert Mitchum, the American film actor and singer, gave critic Roger Ebert a picture that never faded. Ebert named him his favorite movie star and praised his "deep, laconic voice and his long face and those famous weary eyes." Ebert saw him as "the kind of guy you'd picture in a saloon at closing time." In that picture, the man was "waiting for someone to walk in through the door and break his heart." Ebert also called Mitchum the soul of film noir.

  That weary look had to come from somewhere. The questions are where, and what it cost. How did a man so casual about acting become one of the most admired screen presences of his era? Why did a studio keep standing by him, and why did he keep walking away from roles other actors would have chased? And what was a Hollywood tough guy doing at a recording session?

  The answers run through hard years before fame, a stormy relationship with the men who ran his studio, and a marriage that outlasted every rumor.

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• 2. Road to Hollywood

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  Bridgeport, Connecticut, is where Robert Charles Durman Mitchum was born on the 6th of August 1917, into a Methodist family. His father, James Thomas Mitchum, worked in shipyards and on the railroad and had Scots-Irish and Native American roots. His mother, Ann Harriet Gunderson, was a Norwegian immigrant and a sea captain's daughter. His sister Annette, born in 1914, would later act under the name Julie Mitchum.

  In February 1919, a railyard accident in Charleston, South Carolina, crushed James Mitchum to death. His wife was pregnant and received a government pension. She stayed for a time in Lane, her husband's hometown in South Carolina, before returning to Connecticut. Her third child, John, was born in September 1919. Once the children were old enough for school, Ann found work as a linotype operator for the Bridgeport Post. She later married Lieutenant Hugh Cunningham Morris, nicknamed "The Major," a former Royal Naval Reserve officer. They had a daughter, Carol.

  A reputation for pranks and fistfights followed Mitchum through childhood. In 1926 his mother sent him and his younger brother to live with her parents on a farm near Woodside, Delaware. Felton High School expelled him for mischief. At age 11 he ran away from home for the first time.

  In 1929 the two brothers were sent to Philadelphia to live with Julie, who had started her career in vaudeville acts on the East Coast. The following year the family moved with her to New York City. They shared a Manhattan apartment in Hell's Kitchen with Julie and her husband. Mitchum attended Haaren High School and was eventually expelled from there too.

  At age 14, Mitchum left home and crossed the country, hopping freight cars and taking any work he could find. He dug ditches, picked fruit and washed dishes. In the summer of 1933 he was arrested for vagrancy in Savannah, Georgia, and put on a local chain gang. By his own account, he escaped and hitchhiked to Rising Sun, Delaware, where his family had moved. That fall he was recovering from injuries that nearly cost him a leg.

  A few months with the Civilian Conservation Corps, digging ditches and planting trees, ended in July 1934 when he went back on the road. This time he headed for Long Beach, California, where Julie had moved with her husband. The rest of the family soon followed and moved in with her. For three more years Mitchum wandered and worked odd jobs. He also fought in 27 professional boxing matches. He quit the ring after a fight that broke his nose and left a scar on his left eye.

  By 1937 Mitchum had settled in Long Beach. Julie was trying to return to show business and had joined a local theater group called the Players Guild. He often walked her home after rehearsals, grew curious about the productions and befriended her colleagues. With his mother's encouragement he joined, and he made his stage debut in August 1937. He wrote two children's plays. When Julie began singing in cabarets, he wrote lyrics for her and other performers. In 1939 he wrote and composed an oratorio, which Orson Welles produced and directed for a benefit for Jewish refugees.

  Late in 1939, astrologer Carroll Righter hired him as an assistant on a tour of the Eastern Seaboard. Back in California, Mitchum quit writing for cabaret acts after a promised payment never arrived. His wife, Dorothy, was expecting a child, and he wanted steady income. So he 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 1941 brought his last stage appearance before films. The job was hard on his body. Machinery noise damaged his hearing. The graveyard shift gave him chronic insomnia and a spell of temporary blindness. Doctors blamed job-related anxiety, so he left.

  An agent he knew from the theater arranged an interview with Harry Sherman, producer of United Artists' Hopalong Cassidy Westerns, which starred William Boyd. In June 1942 Mitchum began his film career as a minor villain in Border Patrol. It was the first of seven Hopalong Cassidy pictures released in 1943. That year he appeared in 19 films in all. They included his first non-Western, the Universal musical Follow the Band, and an uncredited turn as a soldier in MGM's The Human Comedy, starring Mickey Rooney. He also played supporting parts in the Laurel and Hardy comedy The Dancing Masters and in two Randolph Scott war films, Corvette K-225 and Gung Ho! Harry Cohn offered him a studio contract after seeing his work in Columbia's Doughboys in Ireland. Mitchum turned it down.

  When Strangers Marry, released by Monogram in 1944, gave him his first important role. William Castle directed, with Dean Jagger and Kim Hunter, and Mitchum played a salesman who helps a former girlfriend solve a murder. Reviews were positive, and the picture is now considered a fine B movie. That same year he took a small part in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, with Van Johnson, Robert Walker and Spencer Tracy. Director Mervyn LeRoy was impressed and recommended him to RKO.

  On the 25th of May 1944, Mitchum signed a seven-year contract with RKO at $350 a week, effective the 1st of June. David O. Selznick's Vanguard Films bought a piece of the deal. His first RKO picture was the comedy Girl Rush. Two Zane Grey Westerns followed, Nevada and West of the Pecos, and Nevada gave him star billing for the first time. Both did well with audiences and critics.

  General Dwight D. Eisenhower called The Story of G.I. Joe the greatest war picture he had ever seen. RKO lent Mitchum to independent producer Lester Cowan for the film, directed by William A. Wellman. He played a war-weary officer based on Captain Henry T. Waskow, who stays resolute through every trouble. The story follows an ordinary soldier through the eyes of journalist Ernie Pyle, played by Burgess Meredith. Before its release, Mitchum was drafted into the Army and served as a medic at Fort MacArthur, California. The film earned four Academy Award nominations, including Mitchum's only one, for Best Supporting Actor. It made him a star. Nearly three decades later, Andrew Sarris called his performance "extraordinarily haunting" in The Village Voice.

  In 1946 came Till the End of Time, Edward Dmytryk's hit about returning Marine veterans, with Dorothy McGuire and Guy Madison. Then Mitchum turned toward the genre that would define him.

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• 3. Noir and Scandal

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  In 1946 Mitchum played second lead in two noirs. On loan to MGM, he costarred with Katharine Hepburn and Robert Taylor in Vincente Minnelli's Undercurrent. He played a troubled, sensitive man tangled in the affairs of his tycoon brother and the brother's suspicious wife. At RKO he appeared in John Brahm's The Locket as the bitter ex-boyfriend of Laraine Day's femme fatale. Its layered flashbacks have helped make it a cult classic.

  Raoul Walsh's Pursued, made in 1947 on loan to Warner Bros., paired Mitchum with Teresa Wright. He played a man trying to recall his past and find whoever killed his family. It was his first high-budget Western and is generally considered the first noir Western in American cinema. That year he also appeared in Edward Dmytryk's Crossfire, with Robert Young and Robert Ryan. He played one of several returned soldiers drawn into a murder investigation, because an antisemite in their ranks had committed the crime. Made on a modest budget, Crossfire became RKO's most profitable film of 1947 and earned five Academy Award nominations. Desire Me, with Greer Garson, was his least successful picture that year. Its production was troubled, it was a box office disaster, and it is often cited as the first major Hollywood film released without a credited director.

  After Pursued and Crossfire, Mitchum signed a new seven-year deal with RKO and David O. Selznick. His salary jumped from $1,500 to $3,000 a week. Out of the Past, also known as Build My Gallows High, closed out 1947 as his first starring role in a major RKO production. Jacques Tourneur directed, Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas costarred, and Nicholas Musuraca handled the cinematography. Mitchum played a small-town gas-station owner and former private investigator, haunted by unfinished business with a gambler and a femme fatale. RKO's leaders were unimpressed with the finished film and surprised when it did moderate business. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times found Mitchum "magnificently cheeky and self-assured." Today the picture ranks among the greatest film noirs, and it remains his signature role as the genre's fatalistic antihero.

  On the 1st of September 1948, as his career climbed, Mitchum was arrested for marijuana possession along with actress Lila Leeds. RKO could have invoked the morals clause in his contract and cancelled it. The studio stood by him instead. He served 50 days, split between the Los Angeles County Jail and a prison farm in Castaic, California, and was released on the 30th of March 1949. Life photographers were allowed to photograph him mopping floors in his prison uniform. He told reporters that jail was "like Palm Springs, but without the riff-raff." On the 31st of January 1951, a Los Angeles court and the district attorney's office overturned the conviction after it was exposed as a setup.

  Rachel and the Stranger was rushed into release to take advantage of the publicity, and it became one of RKO's top grossers of 1948. Mitchum played a mountain man competing for the hand of an indentured servant, opposite Loretta Young and William Holden. The same year, Robert Wise's noir Western Blood on the Moon, with Barbara Bel Geddes, cast him as a cowboy caught between cattle owners and homesteaders. Critics raved about his quietly menacing drifter.

  Three films followed in 1949. The Red Pony, adapted from John Steinbeck's novella, was his first color film. In The Big Steal, directed by Don Siegel, he reunited with Jane Greer as an army lieutenant chasing a thief, and it did well at the box office. Holiday Affair, a romantic comedy opposite Janet Leigh, cast him against type. It failed at first but now counts as a Christmas classic with annual television showings.

  By the end of the 1940s he was RKO's biggest star. Studio head Howard Hughes paid $400,000 for Selznick's share of his contract.

  Hughes made the early 1950s turbulent. His Kind of Woman, in 1951, paired Mitchum for the first time with Jane Russell, RKO's top female star. Hughes brought in Richard Fleischer for extensive reshooting of John Farrow's original cut. The Racket, also from 1951, credits John Cromwell, but four other directors worked on it. On Macao, in 1952, Hughes forced Josef von Sternberg off the set and replaced him with Nicholas Ray. The Racket was among RKO's most successful films of 1951. His Kind of Woman and Macao cost so much that they lost money.

  Otto Preminger's Angel Face, in 1953, was the first of Mitchum's three films with Jean Simmons. He played an ambulance driver who lets a murderously insane heiress seduce him to his doom. Initial reviews were mixed, but it is now recognized as a noir classic. Jean-Luc Godard named it one of the best ten American sound pictures. In 2010 Richard Brody wrote in The New Yorker that "the ever-cool Mitchum radiates heat without warmth."

  By then Mitchum was increasingly unhappy with the projects RKO assigned him. His last RKO release, in 1954, was the romantic comedy She Couldn't Say No. His contract expired on the 15th of August 1954.

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• 4. Freelance Peaks

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  Charles Laughton directed only one film in his career, The Night of the Hunter, in 1955. It was based on a novel by Davis Grubb. Mitchum played a serial killer posing as a preacher, hunting for money his cellmate had hidden at the man's home. The film flopped on release. It is now widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time. Mitchum's Preacher Harry Powell is considered by many one of his finest performances. The image of him with "HATE" and "LOVE" tattooed on his knuckles has echoed through popular culture. In 1985 Dave Kehr called the preacher "the role that most fully exploits his ferocious sexuality." Ebert wrote in 1996 that nobody who has seen the film has forgotten Mitchum's voice "coiling down those basement stairs: 'Chillll... dren?'"

  Stanley Kramer's Not as a Stranger, with Olivia de Havilland and Frank Sinatra, also came out in 1955. Mitchum played an idealistic young doctor who marries an older nurse and later questions his own morality. It was one of the year's ten highest-grossing films. Reviews were mixed, and Leslie Halliwell noted that the actors were too old for their characters. That year Mitchum was also fired from Blood Alley at director William A. Wellman's request. He reportedly threw the film's transportation manager into San Francisco Bay, a story he denied. Producer John Wayne took the role himself.

  On the 8th of March 1955, Mitchum formed DRM Productions, named for his and his wife's initials. He signed a five-film deal with United Artists, and four films were made. The first was Bandido, in which he played an American adventurer who sides with rebels during the Mexican Revolution. It was a commercial success.

  Trinidad and Tobago hosted two back-to-back shoots for films released in 1957. In John Huston's Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, Mitchum played a Marine corporal stranded on a Pacific island with a nun, played by Deborah Kerr. Japanese soldiers eventually arrive and set up a base. Critics praised the chemistry between the leads and the tenderness Mitchum brought to the role. It was the first of four films with Kerr, his favorite leading lady. The film earned two Academy Award nominations, and Mitchum was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actor. Fire Down Below, with Jack Lemmon and Rita Hayworth, drew mixed reviews and failed at the box office.

  A driver hauling moonshine was said to have died in a crash on Kingston Pike in Knoxville, Tennessee, somewhere between Bearden Hill and Morrell Road. That incident lies behind Thunder Road, the second DRM production, in 1958. Metro Pulse writer Jack Renfro placed it in 1952 and said James Agee may have witnessed it and passed the story to Mitchum. Mitchum produced the film and co-wrote the screenplay, and he is rumored to have directed much of it. His son James played his younger brother. The film played often at drive-ins and third-house theaters in the 1960s. It has since earned a reputation as the definitive road movie, with a strong following in the South. Geoff Andrew of Time Out admired "a stunningly laconic performance from Mitchum, white-hot night-time road scenes." He also liked its "affectionate but unsentimental vision of backwoods America."

  The Wonderful Country, in 1959, was the third DRM production. Opposite Julie London, Mitchum played an American expatriate gunslinger in Mexico who returns to the States for an arms deal. Audiences and critics largely ignored it then. It is now more highly regarded, and some critics call his performance one of his best and most overlooked.

  Mitchum starred in four films in 1960. In Vincente Minnelli's Home from the Hill, opposite Eleanor Parker, he played the intimidating, philandering patriarch of a powerful Texan family. Reviews were positive, and modern critics cite it as one of Minnelli's masterpieces. He reunited with Kerr in Fred Zinnemann's The Sundowners, as an Australian husband struggling in the sheep industry during the Depression. It earned five Academy Award nominations. Variety said he "projects a great deal of feeling with what appears to be a minimum of effort." The Night Fighters, his last DRM production, and The Grass Is Greener were commercial and critical failures. Still, the National Board of Review named Mitchum Best Actor of the year for Home from the Hill and The Sundowners.

  In 1962 Mitchum faced Gregory Peck in Cape Fear, as an ex-convict seeking revenge on the attorney who testified against him. The role brought him further renown for playing cold, predatory characters. The film itself drew mixed reviews and failed at the box office. Crowther singled out Mitchum's "cheekiest, wickedest arrogance and the most relentless aura of sadism that he has ever managed to generate." In 2006 Jonathan Rosenbaum said its only classic credentials were Mitchum's terrifying performance and a Bernard Herrmann score.

  The Longest Day, also from 1962, put him in an international ensemble about the D-Day landings in Normandy. He played General Norman Cota, rallying demoralized troops and blasting a path from Omaha Beach. Critics singled out his performance. The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, won two, and became the highest-grossing 1962 release in the domestic market.

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• 5. Roles He Refused

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  Talbot County, Maryland, became the Mitchum family home in 1959, and horses became his passion. He took up quarter horse breeding and, over the next several years, grew indifferent to choosing his films. He also lost interest in producing. He renamed DRM Productions as Talbot Productions after the county. By his own account, it had become only a "co-production" company, and he never really produced his own films again.

  John Huston's Western The Misfits, in 1961, was one Mitchum turned down. He disliked the script and had found Huston too demanding on Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison. Instead he played Arch Hall Sr. in The Last Time I Saw Archie, a service comedy directed by Jack Webb. It went unnoticed at the box office. Mitchum often called it his favorite film, because he earned $400,000 for four weeks' work and had time off for Christmas and New Year's at home.

  Five films after Cape Fear drew mostly negative reviews. Critics found him miscast as an indecisive lawyer in Two for the Seesaw, opposite Shirley MacLaine. His cameo in Huston's The List of Adrian Messenger is regarded as one of the director's weaker efforts. He made the adventure Rampage in Hawaii as a family vacation, and critics found it absurd or dull. Man in the Middle cast him as a defense attorney, and his performance seemed lethargic. What a Way to Go! was one of the year's ten highest-grossing films, though critics found it disjointed and overlong.

  In Mister Moses, in 1965, Mitchum played a diamond smuggler in Africa whom a tribe mistakes for a modern-day Moses. He was usually reluctant to join publicity events. This time he went on an extensive tour at the request of distributor United Artists, saying he thought it was "a pretty good picture." Soon afterward he told interviewers he might leave Maryland. He enjoyed the farm's privacy, but the harsh weather and his wife's feelings of isolation prompted a return to Los Angeles. He called it the right decision given his film commitments. During this period he went on two USO tours to Vietnam.

  El Dorado, in 1967, teamed Mitchum with John Wayne under director Howard Hawks. It is considered a quasi-remake of Hawks's Rio Bravo, and Mitchum played a drunken sheriff who helps a rancher fight a corrupt land baron. Rumors about Mitchum's professional attitude, Wayne's health and Hawks's age cast doubt on the project. It became a hit at home and abroad. Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote that Mitchum delivered one of the loveliest hangover sequences on record.

  Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, in 1969, was another picture Mitchum turned down, because he did not want to work with Peckinpah. David Lean's Ryan's Daughter, in 1970, was a different case. Mitchum was considering retirement and worried about the demanding schedule, so he first rejected the script. Screenwriter Robert Bolt approached him again, and he accepted the role of Charles Shaughnessy, a mild-mannered schoolmaster in Ireland. The film earned four Academy Award nominations and won two. Mitchum was widely publicized as a contender but was not nominated. George C. Scott won Best Actor for Patton, a project Mitchum had rejected. Mitchum said he would not make Patton or Dirty Harry for any amount of money, because he disagreed with the morality of the scripts.

  Crime dramas dominated the 1970s, with mixed results. In The Friends of Eddie Coyle, in 1973, he played an aging Boston hoodlum caught between the Feds and his criminal friends. Sydney Pollack's The Yakuza, in 1974, moved the film noir story arc to the Japanese underworld. Farewell, My Lovely, in 1975, cast him as an aging Philip Marlowe in a remake of 1944's Murder, My Sweet. It did well enough with audiences and critics that he played Marlowe again in 1978's The Big Sleep, a remake of the 1946 film. In between, he appeared in 1976's Midway, about the crucial World War II naval battle.

  Marlowe was a role he would play one more time, in a television parody sketch in 1987.

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• 6. A Singing Voice

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  Frank Sinatra once 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." Critic Greg Adams agreed that Mitchum had real talent, unlike most celebrity vocalists. Music was one of the lesser-known sides of his career.

  Filmmakers often used his own voice instead of a professional singer's when his character sang. His singing can be heard in Pursued, Rachel and the Stranger, One Minute to Zero, The Night of the Hunter, The Sundowners and Maria's Lovers. He also sang the title songs of Young Billy Young and River of No Return.

  Calypso music in the Caribbean sparked his first record. While filming Fire Down Below and Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison in Tobago, Mitchum heard traditional calypso and met artists such as Mighty Sparrow and Lord Melody. He recorded Calypso - is like so..., released through Capitol Records in March 1957. On it he copied the calypso sound and style, down to its distinctive pronunciations and slang.

  A year later he recorded "The Ballad of Thunder Road," a song he wrote for the film and co-wrote with Don Raye. The country-style tune became a modest hit, reaching number 62 on the Billboard Pop Singles chart in September 1958. A re-release in 1962 reached number 65. The song appeared as a bonus track on a successful reissue of the calypso album.

  In 1967 Mitchum recorded a follow-up, That Man, Robert Mitchum, Sings, for Nashville-based Monument Records. It moved him further into country music, with songs like "The Ballad of Thunder Road." The album reached number 35 on the country chart. Its first single, "Little Old Wine Drinker Me," climbed to number nine on country radio and crossed over to mainstream radio, where it peaked at number 96. The follow-up, "You Deserve Each Other," reached number 55 on the Billboard Country Singles chart.

  The Academy of Country Music nominated him in 1968 for Most Promising Male Vocalist.

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• 7. Stillness and Legacy

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  "Look, I have two kinds of acting. One on a horse and one off a horse. That's it." Mitchum said this to Barry Norman, who was interviewing him for the BBC about his contribution to cinema. He interrupted the question in mid-flow. His puzzlement at people who found acting hard work also annoyed some fellow actors.

  Mitchum had a photographic memory that let him learn lines with ease, and he was known for his skill with accents. Director Robert Wise recalled that on Blood on the Moon, Mitchum marked his script with the letters "NAR," meaning "no acting required." When George Peppard asked whether he had studied Method acting during Home from the Hill, Mitchum joked that he had studied the "Smirnoff method."

  Early in his career, critics sometimes accused him of sleepwalking. James Agee wrote that Mitchum's "curious languor" in love scenes in Out of the Past suggested "Bing Crosby supersaturated with barbiturates." In 1951 the Monthly Film Bulletin said he performed "somnambulistically" in Where Danger Lives. David Thomson noticed that Mitchum began to attract respectable attention around the late 1950s. In 1973 Andrew Sarris wrote that Mitchum had been "grossly maligned as an actor." His stoic screen presence had been "mistaken for a stone face without feelings." Sarris said he was "reborn in every movie, recreated in every relationship."

  Directors who worked with him thought far more of him. William A. Wellman believed 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 found him "one of the finest natural actors" he had met. Charles Laughton considered him one of the best actors in the world and believed he would have made the greatest Macbeth. John Huston placed him on the same pedestal as Marlon Brando, Richard Burton and Laurence Olivier. Vincente Minnelli wrote that none of the actors he had worked with did it "with such total lack of affectation."

  Howard Hawks praised Mitchum as a hard worker and called him a "fraud" for pretending not to care about acting. David Lean said: "He is a master of stillness. Other actors act. Mitchum is." Lean added that Mitchum could make almost any other actor "look like a hole in the screen." Jane Greer, his costar in Out of the Past and The Big Steal, said: "Bob would never be caught acting. He just is."

  David Thomson ranked Mitchum with Cary Grant and Barbara Stanwyck as one of the three most important actors in film history. Thomson wrote: "Since the war, no American actor has made more first-class films, in so many different moods." Robert De Niro, Clint Eastwood, Michael Madsen and Mark Rylance have all named Mitchum as one of their favorite actors.

  The American Film Institute ranked him the 23rd-greatest male star of classic Hollywood cinema. It also placed his Max Cady and Reverend Harry Powell at numbers 28 and 29 on its list of the greatest screen villains. His star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is at 6240 Hollywood Boulevard. In 2013 he was posthumously inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.

  From 1992 until his death, Mitchum's voice carried the American Beef Council commercials that said "Beef... it's what's for dinner." Trappe, Maryland, once had a Mitchum's Steakhouse, near where the family lived from 1959 to 1965. On the 10th of December 2022, a historical marker honoring him was unveiled in Lane, South Carolina, his father's hometown.

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• 8. Dorothy and the Final Years

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  A swimming hole near Camden, Delaware, is where 16-year-old Mitchum met 14-year-old Dorothy Spence in the fall of 1933. She was a schoolmate of his younger brother, John, whom she had briefly dated. Mitchum fell for her at once. By the time he left for California in 1934, the two had a serious relationship. She stayed in school in Delaware and then went to college in Philadelphia.

  They married on the 16th of March 1940, in the kitchen of a Methodist parson in Dover, Delaware. They had three children. James, born on the 8th of May 1941 and dead on the 20th of September 2025, and Christopher, born on the 16th of October 1943, both became actors. Petrine, born on the 3rd of March 1952, became a writer. Mitchum's grandson Bentley is an actor, and so is his great-granddaughter Grace Van Dien.

  Reports linked Mitchum to other women, including author Edna O'Brien and actresses Lucille Ball, Ava Gardner, Jean Simmons, Shirley MacLaine and Sarah Miles. Even so, he and Dorothy stayed together until his death. In a 1977 interview with journalist Don Short, he said no other woman was "worth lighting a candle for alongside her." His close friends included Jane Russell, his neighbor in Santa Barbara, and Deborah Kerr.

  Mitchum was a Republican who campaigned for Barry Goldwater in 1964. He supported Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George H. W. Bush in 1992, narrating a promotional film for Bush that played at the Republican National Convention. Though born into a Methodist family and married by a Methodist parson, he was non-religious.

  At the 1982 premiere of That Championship Season, a drunken Mitchum assaulted a female reporter. He threw a basketball from the film at a female Time photographer, injuring her neck and knocking out two of her teeth. She sued for $30 million, and the suit eventually cost him his salary from the film. Months later, in a February 1983 Esquire interview, he made statements some construed as racist, antisemitic and sexist. Asked whether the Holocaust had occurred, he answered, "so the Jews say." A month later he apologized, calling his statements "prankish" and "foreign to my principle." He claimed he had recited a racist monologue from the film and the reporter mistook the words for his own.

  The Winds of War, on ABC in 1983, put him in a very different light. As naval officer "Pug" Henry, in a miniseries based on Herman Wouk's book, he drew 140 million viewers over seven days. It was the most-watched miniseries up to that point, and he returned for the 1988 sequel War and Remembrance. In 1984 he entered the Betty Ford Center in Palm Springs, California, for treatment of alcoholism.

  More television followed. He played George Hazard's father-in-law in 1985's North and South and starred opposite Wilford Brimley in the 1986 movie Thompson's Run. In 1987 he guest hosted Saturday Night Live, which also ran Out of Gas, a short film written and directed by his daughter, Petrine. It was a mock sequel to Out of the Past, and Jane Greer reprised her role. He appeared in Richard Donner's 1988 comedy Scrooged.

  In 1991 the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures planned to give him a lifetime achievement award. He rejected it after learning he would have to pay his own transport and accommodations and accept it in person. That year he also received the Telegatto award, and in 1992 the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award.

  Film work continued until the mid-1990s. He appeared in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man and narrated the Western Tombstone. In Martin Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear he played the protagonist police detective, after playing the villain in the original. His last film appearance was a small but pivotal role as director George Stevens in the television film James Dean: Race with Destiny. His last starring role was in the 1995 Norwegian movie Pakten.

  A lifelong heavy smoker, Mitchum died in his sleep at 5 a.m. on the 1st of July 1997, at his home in Santa Barbara, California. The cause was complications of lung cancer and emphysema. Dorothy, his wife of 57 years, was by his side. His body was cremated, and on the 6th of July his ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean off the coast near his home. Only family and his longtime friend Jane Russell attended. A cenotaph in his memory stands in his wife's family plot at the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Camden, Delaware.

  Dorothy died on the 23rd of April 2014, at age 94. As the couple had wished, her ashes were also scattered at sea, so that they could be symbolically reunited at Easter Island.

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