Interesting Facts About ‘Night of the Hunter’ Actor Robert Mitchum You Probably Didn’t Know

Robert Mitchum Had a Habit of Running Away

Mitchum moved around a lot as he looked for his big break. But ever since he was a kid, he had a habit of running away.

“He always returned,” his wife, Dorothy Spence, wrote in Photoplay magazine in 1954. “My family hoped that I’d forget him, yet somehow I couldn’t.”

Inside His Marriage

Mitchum and Spence were married for 57 years before his death in 1997 at age 79. They knew each other back when they were teenagers. Though they had a lasting marriage, he engaged in a three-year affair with Two for the Seesaw costar Shirley MacLaine.

“I found him to be a complex mystery,” she wrote in her 1995 memoir, My Lucky Stars. “Multifaceted, ironically witty, shy to the point of detachment, and incapable of expressing what he personally desired … Perfect … He became a project.”

Robert Mitchum Had a Unique Marriage Proposal

When proposing to Spence, Mitchum uttered, “Stick with me, kid, and you’ll be farting through silk,” per The Guardian.

He Recalled an Interesting Childhood Memory

After his father, James Thomas Mitchum, died in a railway accident in 1919, Mitchum’s mother remarried.

“I’m coming down the steps one night, and I hear these guys talking. I look around the stairway, and I see Al Capone and another guy sitting in the living room having a beef about ‘receipts.’ I knew enough to go back upstairs,” he recalled about his stepdad’s associates.

The Role That Never Happened

Mitchum was initially cast as Captain Tom Wilder in 1955’s Blood Alley, but an altercation on set got him booted from the role. John Wayne ended up playing the character.

“That was supposed to be [Mitchum], but he got into some brouhaha — probably had a few too many. [William A. Wellman] was great; Wild Bill, a fascinating man! Not a good movie, but I liked working with Duke [John Wayne],” Lauren Bacall once said. “We didn’t agree politically, but we got along well and had a sort of chemistry.”

He Addressed Tabloids

The Oscar nominee made headlines for a number of controversial comments and run ins with the law throughout his career. “They’re all true – booze, brawls, broads, all true,” he once said addressing the tabloids.

He Had a Totally Different Vision for ‘The Night of the Hunter’

Mitchum portrayed “Preacher” Harry Powell in The Night of the Hunter directed by Charles Laughton. But he initially had a different vision for his horrifying serial killer character.

“I wanted to take it all the way,” he told Rolling Stone in 1983. “I wanted to scare people to death. The book did that. It was ten times as frightening as the picture. But Charles had such good taste. He kept saying, ‘I make my living reading the Bible. I can’t do this sort of thing.’ As it was, it was pretty good … I guess.”