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).

[4][5][6] His father, James Thomas Mitchum, a shipyard and railroad worker, was of Scots-Irish and Native American descent,[4][7][6][note 1] and his mother, Ann Harriet Gunderson, was a Norwegian immigrant and sea captain's daughter.

[27] Mitchum left home at age 14[28] and traveled throughout the country, hopping freight cars[29] and taking a number of jobs, including ditch digging, fruit picking, and dishwashing.

[64] 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.

[72] An agent he knew from his work in theater got him an interview with Harry Sherman, the producer of United Artists' Hopalong Cassidy Western film series, which starred William Boyd.

[88] That 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.

[105] In 1946, Mitchum appeared in Till the End of Time, Edward Dmytryk's box office hit about returning Marine veterans, with Dorothy McGuire and Guy Madison,[106][107] before migrating to a genre that came to define his career and screen persona: film noir.

[111] 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.

[125] Directed by Jacques Tourneur, costarring Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas, and featuring the cinematography of Nicholas Musuraca, the picture cast Mitchum as a small-town gas-station owner and former private investigator whose unfinished business with a gambler and a femme fatale comes back to haunt him.

[142] That 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.

"[189] However, it is now recognized as a unique masterpiece by some critics, noted for its color-drained visual style, the story that evokes Eugene O'Neill and Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Mitchum's menacing performance.

The first was Stanley Kramer's melodrama Not as a Stranger costarring Olivia de Havilland and Frank Sinatra, in which he starred as an idealistic young doctor who marries an older nurse only to question his morality many years later.

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.

[198][199][200] Mitchum's performance as Preacher Harry Powell is considered by many one of the best of his career,[196][201][197][202][203][204] and the image of him with the words "HATE" and "LOVE" tattooed on his knuckles has left an enduring impact on popular culture, frequently referenced in various media.

John Huston's World War II drama Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison cast him as a Marine corporal stranded on a Pacific Island with a nun, played by Deborah Kerr, as his sole companion, until Japanese soldiers arrive and establish a base.

The film 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.

"[239] Mitchum followed Thunder Road with his second film directed by Dick Powell, The Hunters (1958), in which he played a flying ace who is smitten with the wife of a pilot under his command during the Korean War.

[251] He was teamed with former leading ladies Kerr and Simmons, as well as Cary Grant, for Stanley Donen's romantic comedy The Grass Is Greener, playing an American millionaire who seduces a British countess.

[252] While The Night Fighters[251] and The Grass Is Greener[253] were commercial and critical failures, Mitchum earned the year's National Board of Review award for Best Actor for his performances in Home from the Hill and The Sundowners.

[254] After moving to a farm in Talbot County, Maryland, with his family in 1959, Mitchum developed a new passion for quarter horse breeding and, for the next several years, gradually became indifferent to selecting his films,[255] also losing interest in his work as a producer.

[264] Bosley Crowther of The New York Times stated that Mitchum delivered the "cheekiest, wickedest arrogance and the most relentless aura of sadism that he has ever managed to generate" while noting the disgust and regret provoked by the film itself.

[272] Rampage (1963), an adventure film shot in Hawaii that he made for a family vacation, starred him opposite Elsa Martinelli and Jack Hawkins as a big-game trapper vying for the affections of a hunter's girlfriend during an expedition to capture a tiger-leopard hybrid.

[277] Mitchum, usually reluctant to participate in publicity events, undertook an extensive tour to promote the film at distributor United Artists' request,[278] stating that he believed it was "a pretty good picture.

[279] While he enjoyed the privacy the farm provided, the challenging weather conditions and his wife's feelings of isolation eventually prompted their return to Los Angeles,[280][281] a move he recalled as the right decision given his film commitments.

[286][287] The film, considered a quasi-remake of director Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959),[288] cast Mitchum as a drunken sheriff who, together with his gunslinger friend, helps a rancher fight a corrupt land baron.

[300] 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.

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.

[63][35] Despite his reported affairs with other women, including author Edna O'Brien[359] and actresses Lucille Ball,[360] Ava Gardner,[361] Jean Simmons,[362] Shirley MacLaine,[363] and Sarah Miles,[364] Mitchum and wife Dorothy remained together until his death in 1997.

With his deep, laconic voice and his long face and those famous weary eyes, he was the kind of guy you'd picture in acit saloon at closing time, waiting for someone to walk in through the door and break his heart.Mitchum was the soul of film noir.

[401] 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.