Before His Death, Robert Mitchum Named Hollywood's 4 Toughest Actors

Robert Mitchum spent 50 years working with actors who played tough guys, but in 1996, weeks before cancer took him, he named exactly four men who were legitimately harder than anyone else in the business. The first name on his list stunned everyone in the room. Audie Murphy killed more than 240 enemy soldiers in France and Germany, earned the Medal of Honor, and slept with a loaded pistol under his pillow for the rest of his life. Lee Marvin took a bullet through the sciatic nerve on Saipan, spent 13 months learning to walk again, and refused every script that made war look like an adventure. James Stewart flew 20 missions over Nazi Germany as a B-24 pilot, lost 13 friends over the flak corridors, and never spoke about any of it until 1984. Charles Bronson went into the Pennsylvania coal mines at 10 years old, flew 25 combat missions as a B-29 tail gunner in the Pacific, and came home with frostbite scars on both hands and a Purple Heart he never wore. Mitchum's criteria was brutal and simple. He didn't care about on-set posturing or how many Westerns you had made. He wanted to know what you had done when your life was actually on the line, and what you carried home afterward without breaking. All four men on his list came back decorated and silent, and they all shared one injury Hollywood covered up for 30 years. Murphy could not sleep without the lights on. Marvin drank a fifth of vodka most nights just to quiet the dreams. Stewart's hands shook when engines backfired. Bronson withdrew so completely his first wife told friends she lived with a ghost. Mitchum understood because he had spent a lifetime watching Hollywood mistake endurance for acting, and acting for courage.