He first read it to thousands of nuclear disarmament protesters who, having marched through central London on CND's first new format one-day Easter March, finally crammed into Trafalgar Square on the afternoon of Easter Day 1964. As Mitchell delivered his lines from the pavement in front of the National Gallery, angry demonstrators in the square below scuffled with police.
Mitchell is survived by his wife, the Actress Celia Hewitt, whose bookshop, Ripping Yarns, was in Highgate, and their two daughters Sasha and Beattie. He also has two sons and a daughter from his previous marriage to Maureen Bush: Briony, Alistair and Danny. There are nine grandchildren: Robin, Arthur, Charlotte, Natasha, Zoe, Caitlin, Annie, Lola and Ollie. Mitchell and his wife had adopted Boty Goodwin (1966-1995), daughter of the Artist Pauline Boty, following the death of her father, literary agent Clive Goodwin, in 1978. Following Boty Goodwin's death from a heroin overdose, Mitchell wrote the poem 'Especially when it snows' in her memory.
In 1972 he confronted then-prime minister Edward Heath about germ warfare and the war in Northern Ireland.
He was later responsible for the well-respected stage adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a production of the Royal Shakespeare Company that premiered in November 1998.
In a National Poetry Day poll in 2005 his poem "Human Beings" was voted the one most people would like to see launched into space. In 2002 he was nominated, semi-seriously, Britain's "Shadow Poet Laureate". Mitchell was for some years poetry Editor of the New Statesman, and was the first to publish an interview with the Beatles. His work for the Royal Shakespeare Company included Peter Brook's US and the English version of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade.
In 2009 Frances Lincoln Children's Books published an adaptation of Ovid: Shapeshifters: tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses, written by Mitchell and illustrated by Alan Lee.
"He never let up. Most calls—'Can you do this one, Adrian?'—were answered, 'Sure, I'll be there.' His reading of 'Tell Me Lies' at a City Hall benefit just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq was electrifying. Of course, he couldn't stop that war, but he performed as if he could."
