One of the movies' greatest actors and most colorful characters, a real-life tough guy with the prison record to prove it, Robert Mitchum was a movie icon for an almost unprecedented half-century, the cool, sleepy-eyed star of such classics as The Night of the Hunter; Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison; Cape Fear; The Longest Day; Farewell, My Lovely; and The Winds of War. Mitchum's powerful presence and simmering violence combined with hard-boiled humor and existential detachment to create a new style in movie acting: the screen's first hipster antihero-before Brando, James Dean, Elvis, or Eastwood-the inventor of big-screen cool.

Robert Mitchum: ""Baby, I Don't Care"" is the first complete biography of Mitchum, and a book as big, colorful, and controversial as the star himself. Exhaustively researched, it makes use of thousands of rare documents from around the world and nearly two hundred in-depth interviews with Mitchum's family, friends, and associates (many going on record for the first time ever) ranging over his seventy-nine years of hard living. Written with great style, and vividly detailed, this is an intimate, comprehensive portrait of an amazing life, comic, tragic, daring, and outrageous.

“This is a well-researched, highly entertaining, and revealing biography that contextualizes Mitchum in the broader world of industry and national economics, business and politics.”—Publishers Weekly

“Server sustains a fascination for his subject that is broad enough to encompass the man’s miserable behavior alongside [Server’s] vast admiration for Mitchum’s body of work and hugely iconic personality.”—The New York Times

“Robert Mitchum: “Baby, I Don’t Care” is the big Robert Mitchum book cultists have been waiting for. . . . He was a man’s man in a profession of pretenders, a genuine badass, and the undisputed Boss of Cool. Lee Server captures Mitchum completely, and honors him with this fine piece of work.”—George P. Pelecanos, author of Right as Rain