Robert Mitchum

In the 30 or so years since I started reading and even writing a few of them, Hollywood biographies have gone sharply downhill. Now that the subjects themselves (or, worse, their agents and managers) demand involvement, all you usually end up with are fan magazines in hard covers, recyclings of James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, or the inane as-told-to ramblings of some rubbishy movie star who has been told by acolytes that they have a literary gift above and beyond the accurate spelling of their (often false) names. All the more reason to praise Lee Server's massively magnificent account of Robert Mitchum. True, the actor had the grace to die before the book was complete, thereby placing him beyond reach of libel lawyers; true too, there had never been anything definitive on Mitchum; and true, finally, he was almost the last of the old giants. When he died 24 hours before James Stewart on the last day of June 1997, there really was the feeling that Hollywood, the old Hollywood, had done forward. Was Mitchum a great actor? Almost certainly not. Was he a great film star? Undoubtedly. He was also his own creation, built of decades of drink and drugs and alcohol. Unlike the pygmies who tried to follow in his footsteps down the mean streets of a thousand Philip Marlowe rip-offs, Mitchum was the property of no director, no studio, no writer. Always there, tall in the saddle except when the alcohol caused him to fall off, usually most afternoons; always a better actor than critics allow, because it takes talent to play other people but genies to play yourself in a hundred movies. Mitchum didn't just do something he stood there, and in public as in private, there was a magnificent carelessness about the man. He never really meant to be an actor, but when he found himself acting, he always did it to the best of the abilities of his scripts : in a great movie he was great, and in a bad one he was at least usually watchable. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he had no real stage past, no desire for an Oscar or a fortune in real estate: he wanted to be left alone, to get on with the girls and the guns that were always what he knew best. He was a crapshooter with no time for the crap, and he understood deep down what the cinema was all about. It was all about getting laid and getting paid, but just sometimes you suddenly did a look, a shot, a retake that made you a genius. This is a great book about a great star in the days when they came at you not off some tiny television but off a screen the size of a California carpark. (Sheridan Morley's John G,the authorised biography of Sir John Gielgud, has sold out two hardback editions and will be available in paperback and as an audiobook this winter. He is currently writing his memoirs, Asking for Trouble.) (Kirkus UK)