Sir John Mills(1908–2005)

John Lewis Ernest Watts Mills was born at the Norfolk village of North Elmham, twelve miles north of Norwich, on 22 February 1908, third child of Lewis Mills, the village schoolmaster, and Edith Baker. The family moved to a similar schoolmaster's post at Belton on the Norfolk-Suffolk border when Mills was small. He was schooled at the Sir John Leman School in Beccles, did not go to university (the family money could not stretch), and at sixteen went into a Norwich corn-merchant's office as a clerk and worked there for three years. He left for London in 1928 at twenty, paying for the train ticket with his savings and lodging in a bedsitting room off the Tottenham Court Road, on the working assumption that the dance-and-revue stage might pay better than the corn business.

The first stage work was the chorus line at the Hippodrome in *The Five O'Clock Girl* in October 1929. He worked through a series of musical-revue parts at the Hippodrome and the Adelphi through the depression years, was given his first speaking role in *London Wall* at the Apollo in 1931, and his first West End lead in *The Five and Three* at the Whitehall in 1933. The transition into film came at the Ealing Studios in 1932 when the young director-producer Basil Dean cast him as the second male lead in *The Midshipmaid* opposite Jessie Matthews. He made fourteen films between 1932 and 1938 in supporting roles across British studios (Ealing, Gainsborough, Twickenham, Elstree), met the writer Mary Hayley Bell at the New Theatre in 1939, and married her in January 1941 at the Marylebone Register Office during a week's leave from his army service.

He had enlisted in the Royal Engineers in March 1940, was commissioned a second lieutenant later that year, was invalided out in 1942 with a duodenal ulcer, and went straight to Denham Studios where Noel Coward and David Lean were casting *In Which We Serve*. He took the role of Ordinary Seaman Shorty Blake, the lower-deck Cockney rating who marries Captain Edward Kinross's wartime god-daughter. The film was the foundation event of his cinema career. The team of Coward, Lean, Anthony Havelock-Allan and Ronald Neame came out of *In Which We Serve* and set up Cineguild as a permanent production unit; he was the lead actor on the unit's next four films across the 1940s. *This Happy Breed* (1944) gave him the unhappy son Reg Gibbons; *Great Expectations* (1946) gave him the adult Pip in the David Lean adaptation of Dickens that remains, by post-war critical consensus, the foundational British literary-adaptation film; *The October Man* (1947) gave him the amnesiac shell-shocked office-worker hero. He was, by 1948, the leading man of British post-war cinema and the on-screen version of the British everyman that the post-war Attlee-government cinema was building its identity around.

The fifties and sixties carried the leading-man register through into character work. *The Colditz Story* (1955), *Ice Cold in Alex* (1958, the desert-trek picture in which the climactic glass of cold beer at the Alexandria bar became the most-famous five seconds of British cinema of the decade), the Battle-of-Britain RAF station-commander in *Above Us the Waves* (1955), the gentle-and-broken Highland-regiment colonel Basil Barrow in *Tunes of Glory* (1960) opposite Alec Guinness, and the long sequence of mid-1960s character work (*Tiger Bay* 1959 with his ten-year-old daughter Hayley, *The Family Way* 1966, *Oh! What a Lovely War* 1969). The Oscar came in 1971 for the silent role of Michael, the mute village idiot in David Lean's *Ryan's Daughter* (he had been cast on Lean's recommendation against the studio's preference for John Hurt or Christopher Plummer). He won Best Supporting Actor at the ceremony on the night against Chief Dan George (*Little Big Man*) and Gene Hackman (*I Never Sang for My Father*). The role had no spoken lines; he had been Lean's lead actor in three previous Lean films.

He was knighted in 1976 in the Wilson resignation honours, made a Companion of the British Empire in 2002. He continued working until the end. The 1990s and 2000s film and television work was the elder-statesman register: *Hamlet* (1996) as Old Norway, *Bright Young Things* (2003) as Old Walter the Soho restaurateur, the television *Around the World in Eighty Days* (1989) under Pierce Brosnan. He went blind in 1992 with macular degeneration and went deaf in his last decade and continued working with cue-card prompting from the script supervisors; his last credited role was in his ninetieth year. He died at his home, Hills House at Denham in Buckinghamshire, on 23 April 2005, ninety-seven years old, eight weeks after Mary Hayley Bell had died at the same house. They had been married sixty-four years. The Mills name in its English-side catalogue is the locative *mills*, the place of the watermill or windmill, scattered across the agricultural parish maps; he carried it from a Norfolk schoolmaster's family into the foundation generation of British post-war screen acting alongside his daughters Hayley and Juliet Mills who took the family name into the next.