National Network for Equitable Library Service

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 classics such 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.