Robert Mitchum,  July 2, 1997 at 79.

Mitchum was one of the great icons of  Hollywood's middle period. He began as an extra, graduated to villains in B-Westerns in the early '40s, and ended up with more than 100 movies to his name.

He was a working guy, and the movies he made were, for the most part, B-pictures for general audiences. An example is ``The Racket'' (1951) Mitchum plays the an honest cop in a corrupt precinct, without seeing himself as a hero. Criminals don't make him sick. They just make him vaguely irritated. They're pathetic, and he's going to deal with them, and that's all.

He remained a major star throughout the '50s and early '60s. Though adept in Westerns, Mitchum was at his best in urban parts, and in his last important starring role he was ideally cast as Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler's ``Farewell, My Lovely'' (1975). Like Chandler's writing, Mitchum had a way of being gutsy, low-down and real -- yet perfectly, cool.