Robert Mitchum remains one of the few actors who was even tougher offscreen than on. He was a notorious badass who never backed down from a fight—and always won, whether it was pummeling three marines into submission or knocking out a world-ranked heavyweight in a barroom brawl.
"When you f--k with the ape, be ready to go the route," he said. Or, to put it more bluntly, "When you come to fight, be ready to die."
Mitchum didn't have an easy childhood—his father died when he was 2 and his mother struggled to raise him and his siblings alone. Young Bob soon took to the open road, hopping freight cars and hobo-ing across the country. "I had very little else to do but study characters," he said of those years. "I was sort of a traveling witness. I didn't have a trade and I didn't have a little box of tricks. I had nothing to sell. And I was principally concerned with keeping myself undetected and alive."
Despite a career that was over five decades long, Mitchum was never terribly impressed by fame. "You know what the average Robert Mitchum fan is? He's full of warts and dandruff and he's probably got a hernia, too. But he sees me up there on the screen and thinks, 'If that bum can make it, I can become president.' I bring a ray of hope to the great unwashed."
Charles Laughton and Robert Mitchum became quite close during the filming of The Night of the Hunter. One day, Laughton called his star. "I've been thinking about your attitude, "he said. "You know, all of us have skeletons in our closets, and we keep them in the closet and when people come by we look off in the other direction, pointing our toes at the rug and whistling. But you, not only do you open the door to your closet, but you snatch the skeleton out and brandish it. You've simply got to stop brandishing your skeletons."
(From Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care by Lee Server, Robert Mitchum: In his Own Words by Jerry Roberts and the Heaven and Hell to Play With: The Making of Night of the Hunter by Preston Neal Jones.)