Getting to Know: John Mills

Half a century ago, John Mills was filming the performance that would earn him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. For too long, it has been customary to commend Mills for the decency he exuded on screen, particularly in military roles. But, as Cinema Paradiso reflects upon a remarkable 70-year career, the time has come to recognise the diversity that makes Mills one of the true icons of British screen history.

In the article on John Mills in the International Dictionary of Films and Film-makers, GC Macnab claims that he 'is so unfailingly cheerful, brave, and decent one gets the sense that were he to be cast against type, perhaps to play Adolf Hitler or Genghis Khan, we would warm to his performance and have him home to tea nonetheless'. He may not have been as chameleonic as Alec Guinness, as smouldering as James Mason or as congenial as Kenneth More, while he was never likely to steal romantic leads from Stewart Granger. But Mills could convincingly play characters across the British class structure and possessed a deceptive intensity that made him so effective in postwar films noir. Yet, when he started out, he wanted to be a song-and-dance man like his idol, Fred Astaire.

John Lewis Ernest Watts Mills was born at the Watts Naval Training College at North Elmham in Suffolk on 22 February 1908. His mother, Edith, was the box-office manager at the local theatre, while his father, Lewis, was a maths teacher and the family moved to Belton after he became headmaster of the village school. At the age of six, John performed in a concert in the school hall and his sister, Mabel (who was 14 years his senior), encouraged his artistic side. She would go on to find fame on BBC Television in the first decade after the Second World War as Annette Mills, who played the piano so that a puppet named Muffin the Mule could dance.

While attending Sir John Leman High School in Beccles, Mills made his acting debut as Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. But his education ended at 16 after his parents separated and he worked for a corn merchant in Ipswich before relocating to Limehouse in London to become a sales rep for the Sanitas Disinfectant Company. He continued to act with the Felixstowe Players and made such progress with his dancing lessons that his sister persuaded him and classmate Frances Dee to perform as a double act at the New Cross Empire.

This led to Mills landing a chorus spot in the 1929 revue, The Five O'Clock Show, at the London Hippodrome. But his partnership with pianist George Ponsford proved short-lived, as the 'Rhythmic Duettists' were booed off during only their second performance. Undaunted, Mills auditioned for The Quaints, a repertory company that was about to take the Western Front drama, Journey's End, on a tour of the Far East. He was fortunate in that playwright RC Sheriff thought he had potential and his good luck continued when he befriended Noël Coward during the play's run in Singapore and met the two women he would marry, actress Aileen Raymond and writer Mary Haley Bell.

Coward took a shine to Mills and cast him as Joey Marryot in Cavalcade at Drury Lane. However, Mills turned down the chance to reprise the role in Frank Lloyd's 1933 Hollywood adaptation and had to watch from afar as Frank Lawton played the part in the first winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture to be written and directed by Brits. Mills did make his screen bow, however, opposite Jessie Matthews in Albert de Courville's The Midshipmaid (1932). The same year, he got to perform Coward's classic song, 'Mad Dogs and Englishmen', in the revue, Words and Music. But, while he would continue to tread the boards throughout his career, Mills was becoming increasingly drawn to the big screen.

Jack of All Trades

Small of stature and unassumingly versatile, Mills struggled to make an impact in his earliest ventures. He was scarcely on screen as Ida Lupino's photographer brother in Bernard Vorhaus's The Ghost Camera (1933), but he proved a steady stooge to Will Hay and Leslie Fuller in Thomas Bentley's Those Were the Days and Norman Lee's Doctor's Orders (both 1934), which can be found on Volume 4 of British Comedies of the 1930s. The former is an adaptation of Arthur Wing Pinero's play, The Magistrate, and Mills plays Hay's 15 year-old stepson, Bobby, while the latter sees his newly qualified medic discover that his father is a fairground quack selling patent cures.

Mills appears as a millionaire's son who jumps a ship bound for Australia to pursue an affair with a married woman in Henry Edwards's The Lash (1934), which is available from Cinema Paradiso on The 1930s Collection. He's also in the money in Austin Melford and Graham Cutts's Car of Dreams (1935), as the scion of a musical instrument tycoon who poses as a car dealer in order to romance antique salesman's daughter, Greta Mosheim, But Mills finally caught the public's imagination in his first leading role, Albert Brown, in Forever England (1935), Walter Forde's hearty adaptation of CS Forester's Brown on Resolution, in which a British sailor resists the Germans after being stranded on the Galapagos Islands during the Great War.

He continued to thrive, as Lord Guilford Dudley opposite Nova Pilbeam's Lady Jane Grey in Robert Stevenson's Tudor Rose (1936) and as Jim Connor, the nightclub entertainer whose brother (Robert Newton) is murdered by greyhound racketeers in William Cameron Menzies's The Green Cockatoo (1937), which was based on a story by Graham Greene. Indeed, such was the good impression Mills made that Tyrone Guthrie invited him to join the Old Vic in 1938 and he spent a year earning solid notices in productions like John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, in which Mills took the role of George that would be played by Burgess Meredith in Lewis Milestone's 1939 Hollywood adaptation.

Mills also teamed with American actor Wallace Ford in Raoul Walsh's O.H.M.S. (1937) before playing Peter Colley in Sam Wood's Goodbye, Mr Chips (1939), which earned Robert Donat the Oscar for Best Actor. But the declaration of war against Nazi Germany saw Mills join the Royal Engineers in the autumn of 1939. He was soon transferred from a searchlight battery in Hertfordshire to serve with the 1st Rifle Battalion, Monmouthshire Regiment in Wiltshire. Despite rising to the rank of Second Lieutenant, however, Mills was invalided out of the service with a duodenal ulcer and he returned to movies determined to 'put the lads up on the screen in the right way'.

Natural Born Hero

While in uniform, Mills had been given leave to make the occasional film. He joined forces with Morland Graham to march off to war with the British Expeditionary Force in Ian Dalrymple's Old Bill and Son (1941), only to be stranded in France. Mills would return to the beaches as the resourceful Corporal Binns in Leslie Norman's underrated Dunkirk (1958), but he wasn't quite so heroic as Flight Lieutenant Perry in Anthony Asquith's Cottage to Let (1941), a droll spy story that boasts splendid performances by Alastair Sim and Jeanne de Casalis. The propaganda content was similarly laced with smiles in Will Hay and Basil Dearden's The Black Sheep of Whitehall (1942), which cast Mills as the only student of the correspondence course run by the blusteringly inept Hay. Mills and Hay also found themselves in the ensemble seeking to inflict economic damage upon the Third Reich in Charles Frend's The Big Blockade (1942), a rattle bag of sketches and actuality clips that can be found on Volume 2 of the Ealing Rarities Collection.

Reuniting with Robert Donat, Mills played anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce in Carol Reed's The Young Mr Pitt (1942). But stardom beckoned after his performance in David Lean and Noël Coward's In Which We Serve (1942), which the latter had written as a tribute to his friend, Lord Louis Mountbatten, who had survived the sinking of his ship during the Battle of Crete in 1941. Coward created working-class Ordinary Seaman Shorty Blake specifically for Mills and the flashback sequence in which he recalls meeting future wife Freda Lewis on a train led to Mills and Kay Walsh being teamed as sweethearts again in Lean and Coward's This Happy Breed (1943), as the next-door neighbours whose respective parents were played by Stanley Holloway and Robert Newton and Celia Johnson.

Mills struck another chord as Jim Colter in Sidney Gilliat's Waterloo Road, as he goes AWOL from the Army to return to his South London home to prevent his wife, Tillie (Joy Shelton), from being led astray by spiv Ted Purvis (Stewart Granger). One can almost hear those in uniform cheering from the cheap seats when Colter socks the draft-dodging Purvis on the jaw and Mills would reinforce his hero status as Pilot Officer Peter Penrose, who pals up with Flight Lieutenant David Archdale (Michael Redgrave) upon being assigned to 720 Squadron in Anthony Asquith's The Way to the Stars (both 1945). Once again displaying calmness and dignity under pressure, Mills provided those on the Home Front with the reassurance they needed that the war was being fought by men with the right stuff.

In the decade that followed, as Britain's status diminished along with the Empire, Mills continued to remind audiences of the glory days, as he endured the freezing trek to the South Pole as Captain Robert Falcon Scott in Charles Frend's Scott of the Antarctic (1948); maintained the morale of a seemingly doomed submarine crew as Lieutenant Commander Armstrong in Roy Ward Baker's Morning Departure (1950); organised the escape committee at Oflag IV-C as Captain Pat Reid in Guy Hamilton's The Colditz Story (1954); attacked the German battleship Tirpitz as Submarine Commander Fraser in Ralph Thomas's Above Us the Waves (1955); drove a Royal Army Service Corps ambulance across the Western Desert as Captain Anson in J. Lee Thompson's Ice Cold in Alex (1957); and, as Major Harvey, recruited ME Clifton James (playing himself) to impersonate General Bernard Montgomery in John Guillermin's I Was Monty's Double (1958).

In all of these roles, Mills displayed the stiff upper lip that has become such a cliché in British war films. But he did so with authentic humanity that enabled viewers to identify with his characters, whether they were ratings or officers. However, he was also prepared to explore the distaff side of the military mindset and gave such an imposing performance as Lieutenant Colonel Basil Barrow opposite Alec Guinness's Major Jock Sinclair in Ronald Neame's Tunes of Glory (1960) that he not only received a BAFTA nomination for Best Actor, but he also won the prestigious Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival. But times were changing and Mills had to reinvent himself in order to remain relevant.

On Civvy Street

Resisting Hollywood overtures, Mills committed himself to British cinema. His first postwar role saw him play Pip Pirrip in David Lean's masterly 1946 adaptation of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, with Alec Guinness co-starring as Herbert Pocket and Jean Simmons as Estella. However, Mills was just as proud of Edward Dmytryk's So Well Remembered, which saw daughters Hayley and Juliet Mills respectively play Patricia Roc's character as a baby and as a young girl. Five year-old Juliet would also cameo in Roy Ward Baker's The October Man (both 1947), an intricate noir from the pen of Eric Ambler.

Eager to take control of his career, Mills turned producer for a pair of pictures with director Anthony Pelissier. Respectively drawn from works by HG Wells and DH Lawrence, The History of Mr Polly and The Rocking Horse Winner (both 1949) have come to be more appreciated with time. In reflecting upon the former's modest box-office return, Mills claimed 'I was a blue-eyed hero up to then and audiences hated seeing me as a little wizened chap with smarmed hair, being a henpecked husband. But I wanted to make those two movies and now I'm rather proud of them.' He didn't enjoy the paperwork involved in producing, however, and focused solely on acting in atmospheric thrillers including Robert Hamer's The Long Memory (1953), an adaptation of a Howard Clewes novel that saw Mills play against type as a man bent on revenge after being released from prison.

Demonstrating his undervalued versatility, Mills next played milquetoast Lancashire bootmaker Willy Mossop in David Lean's version of Harold Brighouse's popular play, Hobson's Choice (1954). Assuming what turned out to be his favourite role after Robert Donat was forced to withdraw because of his chronic asthma, Mills more than holds his own against the scene-stealing Charles Laughton in a BAFTA-nominated performance that confirmed a gift for comedy that often went underused outside modest outings like Cyril Frankel's It's Great to Be Young (1956), in which Mills plays Mr Dingle, a teacher trying to tame his rowdy pupils by forming a school jazz band.

Mills returned to Greeneland for Edward Dmytryk's The End of the Affair (1955) to play Albert Parkis, the private eye hired by Henry Miles (Peter Cushing) to snoop on the assignations of his wife, Sarah (Deborah Kerr), and American writer Maurice Bendrix (Van Johnson). This sombre snapshot of Austerity Britain was followed by another pair of gritty thrillers, with Mills showing a gruffer side as Detective Superintendent Mike Halloran investigating the Metroland murder of a flirtatious young woman in John Guillermin's Town on Trial and some 'wrong man' vulnerability as homicide suspect Dr Howard Latimer in The Vicious Circle (both 1957), which was produced and directed by the Carry On duo of Peter Rogers and Gerald Thomas.

Feeling a touch restless, Mills accepted a clutch of overseas assignments. In truth, he looked a little out of his depth as Russian peasant Platon Karatayev offering solace to Count Pierre Bezukhov (Henry Fonda) in King Vidor's lavish Hollywood take on Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. But he also took a blink-and-miss-him cameo as a London cab driver in Michael Anderson's all-star adaptation of Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days (both 1956), which won the Oscar for Best Picture.

But, as angry young men began to dominate the British screen scene, Mills found refuge in the theatre, most notably playing TE Lawrence on Broadway in Terence Rattigan's Ross (1961). Alec Guinness had taken the role in the West End and the screen version was offered to Dirk Bogarde. However, the project fell through and all three actors lost out to Peter O'Toole in David Lean's Best Picture-winning Lawrence of Arabia (1962), although Guinness got the consolation prize of Prince Faisal after Laurence Olivier dropped out. Mills also scored something of a succès de scandale alongside John Gielgud in Veterans (1972), which playwright Charles Wood based on his observations of Gielgud during the filming of Tony Richardson's The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968).

The Family Way

In 1959, Mills agreed to the casting of his younger daughter, Hayley, as orphaned tomboy Gillie Evans in J. Lee Thompson's police procedural, Tiger Bay. He also signed up to play Superintendent Graham, who scours the eponymous dockland district of Cardiff to find Polish sailor Bronislav (Horst Buchholz), who kidnaps the girl after murdering his ex-lover, Anya (Yvonne Mitchell). Such was the quality of the 12 year-old's performance (which earned her the last ever Juvenile Oscar) that she was offered an exclusive contract by Walt Disney to headline David Swift's adaptation of Eleanor H. Porter's beloved childhood novel, Pollyanna (1960).

Mills was familiar with the Disney set-up having played William Robinson in Robert Stevenson's rousing adaptation of Johann David Wyss's perennial children's favourite, Swiss Family Robinson (1960). However, he cropped up in a cameo as a golf caddy to keep an eye on Hayley during the making of Swift's The Parent Trap (1961) and blocked Stanley Kubrick's attempts to cast her in the title role of his 1962 adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Father and daughter would reunite in Ronald Neame's The Chalk Garden (1964), Richard Thorpe's The Truth About Spring (1965) and Roy Boulting's The Family Way (1966), Moreover, Mills also directed Hayley in his sole outing behind the camera, Sky West and Crooked (1965), a rural melodrama written by Mary Hayley Bell that proved a commercial disappointment.

Plans to direct the satirical Great War musical, Oh! What A Lovely War, had to be abandoned when Mills received a hefty tax bill and he had to be content with the role of General Haig in friend Richard Attenborough's 1969 adaptation. Indeed, the Sixties turned out to be a tricky decade for Mills, as he hit his own sixth decade and began to find worthwhile roles increasingly scarce. Things had started out well enough with respective teamings with Dirk Bogarde and Sylvia Syms in Roy Ward Baker's The Singer Not the Song and Flame in the Streets (1961), in which he plays a Catholic priest in Mexico and a trade union leader whose principles are tested when his daughter announces her engagement to a black man. He had also enjoyed bantering with James Mason, as old army rivals bickering over a hotel project in Ted Kotcheff's comedy, Tiara Tahiti (1962).

But Mills was having to get used to the fact that he was now being offered supporting roles rather than leads. Bryan Forbes cast him to excellent effect as Colonel Smedley-Taylor in his 1965 adaptation of James Clavell's POW bestseller, King Rat, and tapped into his comic gifts in the hilarious 1966 reworking of Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osborne's novel, The Wrong Box, in which Mills and Ralph Richardson played Victorian siblings intent on winning the tontine that they had helped set up 63 years earlier. But the only lead that Mills landed around this period was in Massimo Dellamano's giallo, A Black Veil For Lisa (1968), in which he plays a narcotics cop who has the tables turned on him when he tries to persuade murderous crook Robert Hoffmann to kill his unfaithful wife, Luciana Paluzzi.

A Trouper to the End

As he sought a new niche, Mills was cast as Michael, the village mute, in David Lean's Ryan's Daughter (1970), an Irish variation on Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary that starred Sarah Miles as the publican's daughter in the remote village of Kirrary in 1917 Ireland, who cuckolds teacher Robert Mitchum with British officer Christopher Jones. Although Mills won a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for his wordless performance, the film was subjected to such a critical mauling (most notably by Pauline Kael) that Lean didn't make another feature for 14 years.

Frustratingly, as is often the case, the Oscar didn't do much for Mills's career prospects, with the role of Parker, the Gloucestershire farmer who falls in love with his much younger housekeeper (Carol White) in Frank Nesbitt's Dulcima (1971), being a rare lead. Consequently, he found himself increasingly having to subsist on character parts. He reunited with Sarah Miles and her screenwriter husband, Robert Bolt, in playing George Canning in Lady Caroline Lamb, while Richard Attenborough cast him as Lord Kitchener in Young Winston (both 1972) and Indian Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, in Gandhi (1982). Peter O'Toole played Chelmsford's father in Douglas Hickox's Zulu Dawn (1979), as he and British High Commissioner, Sir Henry Bartle Frere (Mills), scheme to goad King Cetshwayo (Simon Sabela) into war in 1870s South Africa.

Resuming contemporary garb, Mills helps NATO computer specialist George Kennedy discover who murdered his family in Edward Dmytryk's The Human Factor (1975) and reunited with Robert Mitchum and Sarah Miles for a glorified walk-on as Inspector Jim Carson in Michael Winner's remake of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1978). Later the same year, Mills played retired intelligence officer Colonel Scudder tipping off Richard Hannay (Robert Powell) about German agents operating in 1914 London in Don Sharp's reworking of John Buchan's spy classic, The Thirty Nine Steps. These may have been minor roles, but they looked better on his CV than the encounters with Brooke Shields in Andrew V. McLaglen's Sahara (1983) and Madonna in James Foley's Who's That Girl? (1987). He was much better used in tandem with Peggy Ashcroft voicing the roles of Jim and Hilda Bloggs in Jimmy T. Murakami's sobering animated rendering of Raymond Briggs's 1982 graphic novel When the Wind Blows (1986).

Away from the cinema, Mills began to find his feet in television around the time he was knighted in 1976. For the second time in his career, his path crossed with Paul McCartney (after The Family Way), who wrote the theme for a shortlived series inspired by Paul Gallico's book about wartime freedom fighters, The Zoo Gang (1974). Four years later, Mills ventured into Marvel Comics territory as Thomas Lindmer, the Sorceror Supreme of the Earth, in Philip DeGuere, Jr.'s Dr Strange (1978) before taking on the role of Professor Bernard Quatermass in Quatermass (1979), the fourth and final series scripted by Nigel Kneale after The Quatermass Experiment (1953), Quatermass II (1955) and Quatermass and the Pit (1958).

Having played Dr Watson to Peter Cushing's Sherlock Holmes in Roy Ward Baker's The Masks of Death (1984), Mills found himself being investigated by Helen Hayes's Miss Marple as Lewis Serrocold in Dick Lowry's Agatha Christie whodunit, Murder With Mirrors (1985). He essayed Henry Rossiter in four episodes of Don Sharp's Barbara Bradford Taylor melodramas, Hold the Dream (1986) and A Woman of Substance (1988) before following typically adept turns as Brigadier Dougal Munro in Charles Jarrott's Night of the Fox (1990) and Bernard Quigley in James Cellan Jones's Harnessing Peacocks (1993) with a fine performance as Mr Chuffey in David Lodge's BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit (1994), which was all the more remarkable as Mills had been almost blind for the last two years.

Undaunted, the 85 year-old toured Australia in a one-man stage show in 1993. He returned to cameo as Old Norway in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (1996), the chairman of the Royal National Gallery in Mel Smith's Bean (1997), Gus the Theatre Cat in David Mallet's Cats (1998) and, hilariously, as a coke-snorting toff in Stephen Fry's Bright Young Things (2003), which was adapted from the priceless Evelyn Waugh novel, Vile Bodies. In 2000, Mills and his son, Jonathan, teamed with director Marcus Dillistone to curate a collection of his home-movies in Sir John Mills' Moving Memories. Dillistone also had the privilege of directing Mills's final acting performance, as a tramp in the 2004 short, Lights2, which was photographed by Jack Cardiff, with whom Mills hadn't worked since Scott of the Antarctic, the making of which is recalled in Craig McCall's documentary, Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff (2010).

Mills died at his home near the old Denham Studios in Buckinghamshire on 23 April 2005. He was 97 and had not wasted a single moment of a life that had helped shape British cinema and remind audiences everywhere of the best facets of the national character. A prolific actor who never took stardom for granted or too seriously. he was dedicated modest and genuine and his gloriously varied body of work should be treasured and enjoyed.