Two who defined true star quality

THE deaths of Robert Mitchum and James Stewart within a day of each other this week marks the passing of two of the great Hollywood movie stars of the century. Each in his own highly distinctive way defined that elusive asset that is true star quality, projecting a formidable screen presence in a wide range of roles while making the acting process seem invisible, unforced and apparently effortless.

A formidable and utterly unassuming talent - and a true maverick in an industry guided by caution on and off screen - Robert Mitchum, who died at the age of 79 on Tuesday, was a physically imposing figure who cut a smouldering and authoritative presence. Like so many of the movies he made at his peak, he was regularly underestimated and, incredibly, he was nominated for an Oscar just once in a career that spanned more than 50 years and more than 100 movies - and that was back in 1945, for a supporting role in The Story of G.I. Joe.

Robert Charles Duran Mitchum's route into the movies was, in a word, circuitous. Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut on August 6th, 1917, he was a rebellious youth who, when he was 16, was arrested for vagrancy and sentenced to seven days on a Georgia chain gang. He fought 27 bouts as a professional boxer and worked at a variety of jobs before marrying and settling down in Long Beach, California, where he became actively involved as a writer and actor with a theatre company.

He started out in movies in 1943, appearing, however briefly in 18 movies during that year alone. Moving up the credits roll he made his breakthrough as the valiant Lt Walker in William Wellman's The Story Of G.I. Joe, and even though he was back in jail in 1948 - serving 50 days for possession of marijuana - his career survived and his bad boy image was enhanced, if anything.

In 1947 he was the private eye in Jacques Tourneur's seminal film noir, Out Of The Past (aka Build My Gallows High) and a murder suspect in Edward Dmytryk's adventurous Crossfire.

His output over the next seven years notably included Don Siegel's The Big Steal, Josef von Sternberg's Macao and Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men - before he delivered the performance of his career in 1955. That was his chilling portrayal of the menacing backwoods preacher in the marvellous Night Of The Hunter the only film directed by Charles Laughton.

The 1960s for Mitchum were bookended by movies made in Ireland. First, in 1960, was the role of Dermot O'Neill, an IRA volunteer in the 1940s, in Tay Garnett's forgettable A Terrible Beauty. In 1969 he was back for what seemed to him - and probably everyone else involved except the director, David Lean - an interminably long shoot in west Kerry for Ryan's Daughter.

Along with the awesome scenic vistas and a powerful storm sequence, Mitchum was one of the best things about Lean's 1916-set epic - cast against type as the shy, mild-mannered village schoolteacher, Charles Shaughnessy, unhappily married to the much younger Rosy Ryan (Sarah Miles). Mitchum's off-screen exploits - and abundant generosity - have long since passed into Dingle pub folklore.

In between those Irish-based productions, Mitchum's most significant credits ranged from the vengeful, sexually threatening ex-convict, Max Cady in the 1961 Cape Fear, to Howard Hawks's exuberant El Dora do with Mitchum's boozy sheriff teamed with "Duke" Wayne's ageing gun-fighter, to Joseph Losey's under-rated psychodrama, Secret Ceremony, with Elizabeth Taylor and Mia Farrow.

In 1973 Mitchum was at the peak of his form as an over-the-hill hoodlum turning informer in Peter Yates's gritty, downbeat The Friends Of Eddie Coyle (banned, mysteriously, in Ireland at the time). Two years later he made an excellent Philip Marlowe in Dick Richards's affectionate film noir reworking, Farewell, My Lovely.

After Mitchum turned 60 in 1977, his roles diminished and his career went into decline, beginning, ironically enough, with his second outing as Marlowe in Michael Winner's dire remake of The Big Sleep.

His final roles were cameos: in Martin Scorsese's 1991 remake of Cape Fear, in which De Niro took on Mitchum's original role in the western, Tombstone, which Mitchum also narrated; and finally, as the tryannical metalworks owner seeking revenge for the murder of his son (Gabriel Byrne) in Jim Jarmusch's iconoclastic western, Dead Man, which seized upon Mitchum's iconic status.

WHEN James Stewart died at the age of 89 on Wednesday, President Clinton said:

"America lost a national treasure today." Half a century earlier, another American president, Harry Truman, declared: "If Bess and I had a son, we'd want him to be Jimmy Stewart."

In the history of cinema, very few actors commanded the love and affection with which the cinema-going public responded to Stewart. For decades, he personified all that was good and decent, and when he revealed a darker side in his later movies, that worked to make him all the more rounded and interesting a personality.

Many directors did not know what to do with this gangling, awkward- looking man who spoke in a hesitant drawl. But Frank Capra did - casting him first as a young man as naive as he is honest in the movie of the Broadway play, You Can't Take It With You. Stewart became Capra's Everyman, the epitome of things good about The American Way, and they collaborated even more successfully in the 1939 M. Smith Goes To Washington, with Stewart as the idealistic senator with homespun values - which earned him the first of his five Oscar nominations - and triumphantly in the glorious, life-affirming 1946 movie, It's A Wonderful Life, in which Stewart's suicidal character, George Bailey, learns self-belief from an angel named Clarence.

In between those two movies he notably co-starred with Marlene Deitrich in Destry Rides Again, with Margaret Sullavan in Ernst Lubitsch's charming The Shop Around the Corner and won the best actor Oscar for the sophisticated comedy, The Philadelphia Story in 1940 - before becoming a war hero who flew more than 20 missions over Germany as bomber pilot and was made a colonel.

After the war and after Capra, Stewart enjoyed two further fruitful collaborations. The first was with Alfred Hitchcock, for whom he made four movies in 10 years: Rope, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much and Vertigo. An intriguing new darkness and complexity shaded his vivid performances as obsessive characters in Rear Window, as the voyeuristic, wheelchair-bound photojournalist and Vertigo, as the acrophobic detective besotted by Kim Novak. Those two rich, enthralling movies stand among the very best work of both Hitchcock and Stewart.

Stewart's collaboration with Anthony Mann yielded six movies between 1952 and 1955, chiefly a couple of outstanding westerns, The Naked Spur and The Man From Laramie, and the big box-office hit, The Glenn Miller Story. Westerns of variable quality dominated Stewart's output in the 1960s, including three for John Ford, of which much the best was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and he turned out a number of slight comedies such as Take Her, She's Mine, in which he was a harassed parent struggling what was then called The Generation Gap.

His last western was Don Siegel's elegiac The Shootist in 1976, and two years later he and Mitchum worked on the same movie for the first and only time. The film was, unfortunately, Michael Winner's The Big Sleep, although it did raise speculation as to how interesting it might have been had Mitchum and Stewart been paired on screen in their glory days.

Back in the early 1980s, when his Hitchcock movies were re-released in cinemas, I had the great pleasure of interviewing Jimmy Stewart. He looked and talked like he had just stepped off the screen, radiating that gracious charm and amiable bonhomie - and, of course, being slow and careful with his words as ever