Tag: Angel Face

Happy 99th Birthday, Robert Mitchum!

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The iconoclastic Robert Mitchum was born Robert Charles Durman Mitchum 99 years ago today in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Here are 10 RM Did-You-Knows:

  • His father, a railroad and shipyard worker, died in a train accident when Mitchum was two. He was raised by his mother and stepfather, a British army major.

  • Mitchum had issues with authority from an early age, and he spent much of his teens on the road. At 14, he was charged with vagrancy and spent time on a Georgia chain gang (he escaped).

  • While living with his older sister in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen, he was expelled from Haaren High School, at which point he traveled the country by riding the rails, working for the Civilian Conservation Corps and earning money as a boxer.

  • He once worked as a ghostwriter for an astrologist (this delights us, by the way).

  • He recorded several record albums, including a Calypso record titled Calypso — Is Like So…, and generally was not dubbed when he sang in a movie.

  • Mitchum was arrested on September 1, 1948, for marijuana possession. He spent a week in the L.A. county jail and after being convicted, spent 43 days at a prison farm in Castaic, California. In 1951, the conviction was overturned, and many years later, Mitchum told TCM‘s Robert Osborne the arrest never happened, that it was all a publicity stunt. (What’s the truth? Your guess is as good as ours.)

  • Though he was true to her at times only in his fashion, Mitchum and his wife, Dorothy, remained married for more than 57 years until his death in 1997.

  • Mitchum was the voice of the “Beef…it’s what’s for dinner” television advertisements from 1992 until his death.

  • Mitchum was known for passing on roles that later proved to be iconic, among them Gen. George S. Patton, played by George C. Scott in Patton, and Det. Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry, portrayed by Clint Eastwood.

  • Mitchum was a big fan of Elvis Presley‘s early music and tried to sign him to appear in Thunder Road, but Col. Tom Parker‘s asking price was too steep for the independent production.

Happy birthday, Robert Mitchum, wherever you may be!

Robert Mitchum

Goodbye to Another Glorious Gal: Mona Freeman

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We came across, as perhaps you did, too, a notice or two that actress Mona Freeman had passed away at the age of 87. Hers was a relatively modest career, though she had some well-known projects among her credits.

She starred in Black Beauty (1946), for example, and assayed smaller roles in The Heiress (1949) and Angel Face (1952), among many others, before moving on to a very active television career in the 1950s and ’60s.

After giving up acting, she devoted herself to painting, and not without success. Her portrait of Mary See, the mother of the founder of See’s Candy, a California-based company, can still be seen in many of the chain’s more than 200 shops across the country.

But what we didn’t know is that Freeman was, in 1941 and at the ripe old age of 14, named NYC’s very first Miss Subways (this despite the fact that she’d never ridden the subway at the time), which meant that her photograph appeared on a poster that was seen by millions of straphangers daily.

The Miss Subways program, undertaken to draw riders’ eyes to the advertisements that line the walls of commuter-filled cars, lasted until 1976. Approximately 200 young women were afforded the honor over that span.

But the very first of them was Mona Freeman, who died in her home in Beverly Hills on May 23.