Sir John Mills
February 28, 1908 - April 23, 2005
Much-loved actor who, in more than 70 years of performance, epitomised English charm and grit on stage and screen

JOHN MILLS was the most English of actors, portraying on stage and in dozens of films characters of decency, loyalty, self-deprecation and quiet, understated courage. When a director wanted someone to personify Englishness Mills would be top of the list. The blue eyes, the cow's lick of hair, which in early days fell regularly across his forehead, and his ability to convey a sense of honesty and resilience all saw to that.

In some areas he was overshadowed by his friends and contemporaries. Olivier had a glamour to which Mills could never aspire. In the classical roles Gielgud reigned supreme and this was a territory Mills rarely entered after playing Puck to Robert Helpmann's Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Old Vic just before the war. Mills' lack of inches lost him some of the drawing-room comedy parts claimed regularly by Rex Harrison.

All this Mills, the least jealous of actors, accepted without complaint. He was even prepared to give way to his own family. When, in 1959, he agreed to appear in the film Tiger Bay with his 12-year-old daughter, Hayley, he knew that he would be the loser and sure enough the critics came up with headlines such as Little Miss Mills acts her father off the screen.

One of the first people to spot Mills' qualities was Noël Coward. At the start of his career Mills joined a repertory company called The Quaints on a tour of the Far East, where nightly they played everything from Hamlet to Young Woodley. Coward, holidaying in Singapore, saw The Quaints do Mister Cinders, a musical by Vivian Ellis (successfully revived at the King's Head in London in 1983), and was much impressed by the juvenile lead, John Mills. Indeed, Coward liked the whole company, and for a couple of performances stood in for a sick actor, playing Stanhope to Mills' Raleigh in R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End.

Coward remembered Mills and later knew just how to use him. Back in London, Coward wrote the song Mad Dogs and Englishmen for him. The role of Shorty Blake in In Which We Serve (1942) was created by Coward especially for Mills and became the first of a series of war heroes, which by the end of the 1940s had made him one of the most familiar faces in British cinema.

Mills used to refer, only half disparagingly, to these roles as his up periscope! period. He knew that he played them supremely well. He knew also that he was at his best when working with British writers and directors from the top drawer. Men like David Lean and Anthony Asquith drew from him his greatest screen performances; on stage he was likely to shine most brightly in Rattigan and Coward.

But there was, too, an ability to come up with the unexpected. In his mid-sixties Mills took the younger critics by surprise with a show-stopping tap dance in The Good Companions. The musical, concocted out of J. B. Priestley by André Previn, Johnny Mercer and Ronald Harwood, was scarcely worthy of that array of creative talent, but Mills delivered the goods, reminding those who had forgotten that he started his stage life as a hoofer and had not lost the art. Similarly, after playing a number of NCOs and flight lieutenants on screen he could put on rank and give a chilling performance as Field Marshal Haig in his friend Richard Attenborough's Oh! What a Lovely War (1969).

Lewis Ernest Watts Mills was born in Suffolk, the son of a local headmaster. His mother had once aspired to be a professional dancer and taught her son some basic steps which were to be useful to him once he took to the boards. He was unhappy at Norwich High School, where his small stature made him prey to bullies, until he learnt some ju-jitsu and floored his tormentors. The story is told in his autobiography, racy and sentimental by turns, Up in the Clouds, Gentlemen Please (1980). He was good enough at games to get a trial with Norwich City, but the family preferred the safer option of a shipping clerkship with a local chandler. Corn to corn, Mills was apt to mutter later when playing in a bit of West End froth.

He did not stay long with the bales of grain and left for London and a job as a rep with Sanitas, which manufactured bathroom equipment. He was a rotten salesman, not least because he made all his calls in the morning in order to go to dancing class in the afternoon. In the latter he had the encouragement of his elder sister, Annette, who was to gain the devotion of a generation of children with Muffin the Mule on television. Mills was soon sacked by Sanitas, but he did get an engagement at the New Cross Empire with a young blonde, about to become famous for her remarkable cleavage, Frances Day.

Mills and Day could have been a double act. Both were offered jobs in the chorus of a Guy Bolton musical, The Five O Clock Girl (1929), at the London Hippodrome. Mills accepted; but Day said no. Mills at the time saw himself as an English Fred Astaire, but when he joined The Quaints in 1929 he had to play everything from the Second Gravedigger in Hamlet to the title role in Young Woodley.

It was Coward's influence when the company returned to London that got Mills his first West End lead: Lord Fancourt Babberly in Charley's Aunt at the New Theatre. He was at the time the youngest actor to have tackled the role, and it is a tribute to his youthfulness and fitness that he played it again 24 years later, at the same theatre under John Gielgud's direction. Coward cast Mills in his own play, Cavalcade, and in the following year, 1932, in his revue Words and Music.

Mills' screen debut, also in 1932, required him to sing and dance (with Jessie Matthews) in The Midshipmaid. He made a quantity of films in the 1930s, most of which are now forgotten. An exception is Forever England (1935), based on C. S. Forester, where his performance as a plucky able seaman in the First World War possibly influenced Coward when he came to write In Which We Serve. There were regular West End roles, including a long run in Vivian Ellis' Jill Darling (1934) where he had the hit number, I'm on a See-saw.

He was about to have something of a see-saw life himself. His marriage in 1932 to the actress Aileen Raymond was failing and he had met fleetingly a colonel's daughter, Mary Hayley Bell. An adaptation of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1939) had given him his strongest West End role to date and Tyrone Guthrie invited him to join his Old Vic company. But Mills had played only a couple of roles there (including Puck) when war was declared.

He joined up immediately as a sapper with his old friend from revue days, Anthony Pellisier, but was invalided out with a duodenal ulcer soon after getting his commission. Mary Hayley Bell had come back into his life, and they were married in 1941. That year he made his first film with Anthony Puffin Asquith, Cottage to Let (1941), taking the risk of playing a villain for once. The picture was also notable for the screen debut of a child actor called George Cole. Mills supported his new wife by appearing in her first play, Men in Shadow (1942), at the Vaudeville, which he co-directed with Bernard Miles. The John Mills-Mary Hayley Bell partnership reached its apex in a grand guignol piece, Duet for Two Hands in 1945.

But the 1940s was the decade in which he was claimed by the cinema, winning a huge following with the gutsiness and honesty of his performances. Coward put him in In Which We Serve and so began an association with the co-director David Lean, who knew exactly what to do with Mills. The trio worked together again on This Happy Breed (1944) before Lean drew from him one of his finest performances in the best of all Dickens screen adaptations, as Pip in Great Expectations (1946). Before that he had sent Stewart Granger rolling down the stairs in Waterloo Road (1945) and played a fighter pilot in Anthony Asquith's The Way to the Stars (1945). There his recital of the John Pudney poem, Johnny in the Cloud, demonstrated a mellifluous speaking voice on which too few directors were inclined to capitalise.

Mills took the title role in the much-trumpeted Scott of the Antarctic (1948), but the film was ponderous. At this point the screen career took a downturn. The work was there, but too many of the films were mediocre, although he did profess a liking for The History of Mr Polly (1949), based on the H. G. Wells novel and directed by his old friend, Anthony Pelissier. Graham Greene had no kind words for The End of the Affair (1955) and Mills continued to replay the Second World War in The Colditz Story (1955), Above Us the Waves (1955), Dunkirk (1958) and Ice Cold in Alex (1958), where he had a love scene, revealing for its day, with Sylvia Syms.

It again took David Lean to find something more worthy. He did this first in Hobson's Choice (1954), casting Mills as Willie Mossop, the worm who turned. Mills often regarded it as his favourite role. In 1970 came Ryan's Daughter in which Mills' interpretation of the village idiot, dumb and snaggle-toothed, deservedly won him an Oscar. This performance, together with Pip in Great Expectations (1946) and the new-broom military commander in Ronald Neame's Tunes of Glory (1960), were among the peaks of his screen career.

During the late Fifties and Sixties he virtually deserted the stage. An exception was Ross (1961), in which he took over in New York the part of T. E. Lawrence created by Alec Guinness in London. It marked a reunion with Terence Rattigan, who had written the script for The Way to the Stars (1945). Playwright and actor were, in many ways, made for one another and it is a pity the partnership was seen so rarely.

Meanwhile Mills was watching his children become performers. Juliet achieved West End stardom in an early Peter Shaffer play, Five Finger Exercise (1958). After the success of Tiger Bay, Hayley was swept off to Hollywood but returned for Whistle Down the Wind (1961), which was based on a novel by Mary Hayley Bell. Mills appeared with her in a number of routine films and directed her in one, Sky West and Crooked (1966), which was co-scripted by his wife.

But these were generally undistinguished years until Lean came along with Ryan's Daughter (1970). Probably it was his success here that persuaded Mills to take a chance with Veterans (1971) in which he appeared alongside John Gielgud. Charles Wood's comedy was loosely based on the filming of The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968). Audiences at the pre-London run were disconcerted by two theatrical grandees effing and blinding, but when the play reached its proper home, the Royal Court, no one turned a hair.

Thereafter Mills went back to his first love, musicals. The Good Companions (1974) was followed, less successfully, by Great Expectations. At the Chichester Festival Theatre in 1982, Patrick Garland assigned him the title role in Goodbye Mr Chips, based more on the Peter O'Toole remake film than on the Robert Donat original (in which Mills had had a small part). At 74, Mills proved that he could still dance nimbly and put a number across. His last major parts on stage were as the retired general in Brian Clark's underrated play The Petition (1986), directed by Peter Hall at the National, and as Doolittle in Pygmalion in 1987.

Until the 1970s Mills largely eschewed television and he never made the medium his priority. But in his later years he took supporting roles in a variety of dramas, including Barbara Taylor Bradford's A Woman of Substance (1983) and Mary Wesley's Harnessing Peacocks (1992). He played Jarvis Lorry in A Tale of Two Cities (1991) and, in 1994, gave a delightful cameo as Mr Cuffey in Martin Chuzzlewit. By this time he was very deaf and almost blind, and his scripts had to be read to him. He had, however, no thoughts of retirement.

He had a part, albeit tiny, in Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film of Hamlet and he continued to perform his one-man show, An Evening with John Mills. Despite his infirmities, he regularly appeared at film premieres and theatrical occasions. In 2000 he paid a public tribute to the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, whom he had known for nearly 60 years, at the London pageant to celebrate her 100th birthday.

In January 2001 Mills and his wife, whose plans for a church wedding had been frustrated by the Second World War, finally walked up the aisle at St Mary's, Denham, in Buckinghamshire. Lady Mills, who had Alzheimer's disease, left her wheelchair to take his arm as they renewed their marriage vows. At the general election that year Mills, a lifelong Conservative, sprang a surprise by endorsing Tony Blair.

Sir John continued to work well into his nineties, playing a comedian in Sir Stephen Fry's film Bright Young Things in 2003.

He was appointed CBE in 1960 and knighted in 1976. His first marriage was dissolved in 1940. He is survived by his second wife, Mary Hayley Bell, their son, Jonathan, a director, and two daughters, Juliette and Hayley, who are both actresses.

Sir John Mills, CBE, actor, was born on February 28, 1908. He died on April 23, 2005, aged 97.