He furthered this in Mike Leigh's 1984 unemployment drama Meantime, co-starring with Gary Oldman and Phil Daniels. If it was playing the blood-soaked undercover cop in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs that made his career in 1992, it was acting for the likes of Clarke, Leigh and Stephen Frears (as a thug in The Hit) that defined him. Tim Roth may be a 44-year-old family man with an Oscar nomination on his CV, but there's still something quite punky about him. As a teenager he could be found in Camden's infamous venue, The Music Machine, shouting "kill the hippies".
He could do more a look than most actors could do with three pages of dialogue."The Robert Mitchum season continues at the NFT, London SE1 (020-7928 3232) to 31 August. It was based on the folksy wartime journalism of Ernie Pyle, the legendary foreign correspondent who travelled with the US army. There is real pathos in Mitchum's performance as the officer who tries to hide his own weariness, fear and exasperation for the sake of his men.Audiences warmed to his fatalism and his deadpan humour. These were qualities that would also feed into his great roles in film noir, most notably in Jacques Tourneur's Out Of The Past (aka Build My Gallows High) and Charles Laughton's The Night Of The Hunter.Perhaps Adrian Wootton, director of the NFT's Crime Scene season, puts it best when he says: "Mitchum was one of the most subtly intelligent and minimalist actors that has ever graced a cinema screen. "He was a very funny man; a very bright man, too," Simmons insists. "He would write poems, write songs."Mitchum was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on 6 August 1917. It's sometimes hard to sift the facts from the myths about his childhood.
Mitchum was expert at covering his tracks, often giving starkly contradictory accounts to interviewers. Nonetheless, it is established that he was arrested for vagrancy in Savannah and escaped from a chain gang after six days.Given the suffering that he witnessed at first hand in his travels across Depression-era America, it's hardly surprising that he regarded the film business as something less than a matter of life and death. There was a nagging suspicion, too, that he felt just a little bit embarrassed about being an actor: it wasn't a manly profession.But one quality Mitchum had in abundance was an innate decency. Unfairly neglected these days, GI Joe stands as a Second World War counterpart to Robert Altman's M*A*S*H. That was why William Wellman chose him to play Captain Walker in The Story Of GI Joe (1945), his breakthrough film and the only one for which he was ever to receive an Oscar nomination. He made it look so easy - and it ain't." Despite his easygoing fa?e, Simmons says, Mitchum was extremely disciplined He always knew his lines and was never late on set.
