Robert Mitchum (6 August 1917-1 July 1997) was an American actor, director, author, poet, and singer. Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1917 to an Irish-American railroad worker and his Norwegian immigrant wife, he became a vagabond in his youth amid the Great Depression, and he rode the railroad to Long Beach, California in 1936 and became an actor in the 1940s. He went on to become a film noir antihero, and he came to be one of the AFI's "greatest male stars" of Classic American Cinema. Like his son, the actor and political candidate Christopher Mitchum, Mitchum was a Republican. He died in 1997.