Robert Mitchum

One of the movies' greatest actors and most colorful characters, a real-life tough guy with the prison record to prove it, Robert Mitchum was a movie icon for an almost unprecedented half-century, the cool, sleepy-eyed star of such classics as The Night of the Hunter; Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison; Cape Fear; The Longest Day; Farewell, My Lovely; and The Winds of War. Mitchum's powerful presence and simmering violence combined with hard-boiled humor and existential detachment to create a new style in movie acting: the screen's first hipster antihero-before Brando, James Dean, Elvis, or Eastwood-the inventor of big-screen cool.

Robert Mitchum: "Baby, I Don't Care" is the first complete biography of Mitchum, and a book as big, colorful, and controversial as the star himself. Exhaustively researched, it makes use of thousands of rare documents from around the world and nearly two hundred in-depth interviews with Mitchum's family, friends, and associates (many going on record for the first time ever) ranging over his seventy-nine years of hard living. Written with great style, and vividly detailed, this is an intimate, comprehensive portrait of an amazing life, comic, tragic, daring, and outrageous.

“This is a well-researched, highly entertaining, and revealing biography that contextualizes Mitchum in the broader world of industry and national economics, business and politics.”—Publishers Weekly

“Server sustains a fascination for his subject that is broad enough to encompass the man’s miserable behavior alongside [Server’s] vast admiration for Mitchum’s body of work and hugely iconic personality.”—The New York Times

“Robert Mitchum: “Baby, I Don’t Care” is the big Robert Mitchum book cultists have been waiting for. . . . He was a man’s man in a profession of pretenders, a genuine badass, and the undisputed Boss of Cool. Lee Server captures Mitchum completely, and honors him with this fine piece of work.”—George P. Pelecanos, author of Right as Rain

Lee Server is the author of the critically acclaimed Danger Is My Business; Sam Fuller: Film Is a Battleground; Over My Dead Body; and other works on cinema history and popular culture.