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Archive 1

Death

I'm sad to learn of John Mills death. Jooler 08:28, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

This talk page is no place to discuss feelings about someone's death. Marcus2 12:02, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Get Stuffed! Jooler 12:28, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I agree a talk page isn't exactly the most appropriate place, but it isn't defacing the main article. Most visitors of Wikipedia don't even know that the talk page of the article they are reading exists. User:Marcus2's quote was a bit harsh though.--Speedway 16:27, Apr 25, 2005 (UTC)
I don't see anything harsh in what I said. I'm just telling it like it is. Marcus2 17:23, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
It was extremely thoughtless thing to write. While it's true that the main purpose of these talk pages is to improve the quality of the article in question the odd comment out of context does no harm whatsoever. John Mills was a lovely man and I was very honoured to meet him. I am genuinely sad to hear of his death and your comment was in very poor taste. Jooler 18:51, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Well 'Get Stuffed' wasn't the most professional thing to reply with. But your above answer was, and I fully agree with you. --Speedway 19:50, Apr 25, 2005 (UTC)
Shall we all move on now? Brookie:the wind in the grass 19:05, 13 May 2005 (UTC)


Technically -- the Cats performance in 1998 is filmography.138.163.0.42 (talk) 16:50, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately, because of his misguided support for Bliar/Liebour at the 2001 General Election, the 'copybook' of John Mills will forever more be 'blotted'! He made a fool of himself and has accordingly been erased from the affections of most Britons - even those who traditionally voted Liebour!

Sir John Mills -- Film Omission.

In the Wikipedia film listing for Sir John Mills, his 1964 film "The Truth About Spring" (U.S. title) has been omitted. This film is listed on IMDB. It is "out of print" and not available as far as I can determine, but I do recall seeing and thoroughly enjoying it, long ago. Mills stars with his daughter Hayley, James MacArthur, and Lionel Jeffries. One of Mills' BEST!

4.246.135.186 (talk) 03:17, 7 November 2008 (UTC) Jack R. Ellis, Fresno California USA <mezukoylian@sprynet.com>

Original title is: The Pirates of Spring Cove - article here: The Truth About Spring. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.7.147.13 (talk) 20:50, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

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Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on John Mills. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

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place of birth

In the article it says: 

"Mills was born in Norfolk but grew up in Felixstowe,[...]"

But that sentence has his obiturary as a reference, and in the reference it says instead: 

"[...] he was born in Felixstowe, Suffolk, the son of a mathematics teacher, grew up in Norfolk,"

Is that a simple quoting error in the article, I wonder? --AchimP (talk) 16:30, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

Changed it according to the reference given. --AchimP (talk) 15:15, 24 May 2018 (UTC)
It appears that reference is incorrect - he was born in Norfolk (as the info box correctly states) according to his entry in the ODNB, which cites his birth certificate, transcribed below:

Mills, Sir John Lewis Ernest Watts (1908–2005), actor, was born at Watts Naval Training School for Boys (a branch of Dr Barnardo's Homes) in Bintree, North Elmham, Norfolk, on 22 February 1908, the son of Lewis Mills (1867–1953), schoolmaster, and later headmaster of the village school at Belton, Suffolk, and his wife, Edith Catherine, née Baker (1868–1935). He had one sister, Edith Mabel, who later changed her name to Annette [see Mills, Annette (1894-1955)]. Fourteen years older than John, Annette was a dancer and it was she who first encouraged his desire to be an actor. He was educated first at his father's school in Belton, then at Balham grammar school, London, followed by Sir John Leman High School, Beccles, Suffolk, and finally Norwich High School for Boys, where at first, being small for his age, he was bullied. On leaving school, where he had distinguished himself more on the playing field than in the classroom, he was forced to supplement family finances by taking a job as a clerk in Ipswich. During this time he joined both the Felixstowe Players and the local amateur dramatic society. With limited support from his father, now separated from his mother (who, like Annette, was enthusiastic about his chances in the theatre), he set off for London and what eventually became one of the longest careers in British show business; not, however, before a brief, unsuccessful stint as a door-to-door salesman for Sanitas Company, toiletry suppliers.

Mills began his stage career as a dancer, first appearing at the New Cross Empire with Frances Day, then in the chorus of The Five O'Clock Girl at the London Hippodrome in 1929. (Over forty years later, in 1973, he delighted theatre audiences with a complicated tap routine in a production of The Good Companions.) Joining a travelling company called The Quaints, he embarked in the same year on a tour of the Far East that would introduce two very influential people into his life. In Tientsin, China, he met Mary Hayley Bell [see below], his doubles partner at tennis and, twelve years later, his second wife. The other meeting was professionally crucial: in Singapore, Noël Coward saw the company's performance of Journey's End, and was impressed enough with the young actor playing Raleigh to have him in mind for roles in Cavalcade (1931) and the musical revue Words and Music (1932).

Mills retained a lifelong love of the theatre and returned to it throughout his career, but it is as a film actor that he made a greater mark. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that he became the quintessential British film star. In the 1930s he appeared in twenty films, starting with the Jessie Matthews musical The Midshipmaid (1932), and perhaps most notably including Brown on Resolution (1935; reissued as Forever England), a naval adventure derived from C. S. Forester, and Mills's first major starring role in films. Most of his other films of the decade were unmemorable, though he was a likeable hero in The Ghost Camera (1933), drew engagingly on his song-and-dance skills in Car of Dreams (1935), and touchingly partnered Nova Pilbeam in the historical drama Tudor Rose (1936). On 12 March 1932 he had married the actress Aileen Cynthia Raymond (1910–2005), with whom he had acted on the Far East tour. She was the daughter of George Raymond, medical practitioner. By the late 1930s the marriage had failed, and Mills re-met Mary Hayley Bell, now in England and recovering from a broken romance. They eventually married on 16 January 1941, after Mills and his first wife had divorced.

The Second World War made Mills a star. He had been coming along quite agreeably in the 1930s without making a great impression: pleasant-looking rather than handsome, shorter (at about 5 feet 6 inches) than most leading men, adept across several genres rather than a compelling hero in any particular one. Invalided out of the Monmouthshire regiment with an ulcer in 1941, he was lucky enough to be in a series of popular, prestigious films in which he established a new sort of Everyman hero in British cinema. He may have lacked the dash of Robert Donat or the suavity of David Niven or the sensual menace of James Mason, but what he did convey was an essential decency and loyalty, a reliability in crisis that was especially reassuring in the early 1940s, a modesty of bearing (making his slight frame work for him), and a courage that was the more impressive for being so understated. There was a chap-next-door ordinariness about his persona that struck some very responsive chords.

Noël Coward, whom Mills claimed to have dubbed the Master, wrote the role of Shorty Blake with Mills in mind when he was preparing In Which We Serve (1942), a tribute to Lord Mountbatten's ship the Kelly, which had been sunk in the eastern Mediterranean. Mills's working-class boy who becomes a hero struck a true note in a film whose restraint later came to seem somewhat theatrical, and this was also true of his Billy Mitchell, who becomes a naval officer in the film of Coward's This Happy Breed (1944). Mills co-starred to convincing effect in both with Kay Walsh, then the wife of David Lean, who directed both and who would be a continuing influence in Mills's career. There were several other wartime films for Mills, including the submarine adventure We Dive at Dawn (1943) and the air force drama The Way to the Stars (1945), both for the director Anthony Asquith. The latter film, in production during the last months of the war but not released until after its end, was one of the most affecting films of the period, with Mills's reading of John Pudney's poem 'For Johnny' to a comrade's widow (Rosamund John) a quietly emotional highlight. In Waterloo Road (1945), he played a soldier who goes absent without leave to protect his wife from the unwelcome attentions of a spiv-like lothario and cemented his reputation as the ordinary man who can rise to the occasion. In a very cleverly staged fight, short, slight Mills convincingly dealt with the much taller and heavier Stewart Granger.

It was as though these wartime roles had been preparing Mills for the post-war British cinema in which a new realism would predominate, at least in those films that brought most prestige to the industry. Mason and Granger would shortly defect to Hollywood but Mills remained a British star, only rarely venturing into American films. In his first post-war role, he was a definitive Pip in Lean's classic version of Great Expectations (1946). When, at the film's end, he rips down the curtains in Miss Havisham's decaying mansion, this can be seen as symbolic of shedding new light on ossified traditions—and announcing a new sort of hero, not merely one who has risen in society but also one who will not be satisfied merely to perpetuate the past. In his next (and contrasting) post-war role, in The October Man (1947), Mills played Jim Ackland, a brain-damaged man who fears he may have killed someone: the murder inquiry is secondary to the 'internalised battle involving Jim's psychological problem' (Mayer, 102). Mills's versatility was being subtly confirmed in such roles, which allowed mutations on the Everyman persona without obliterating it. He might have made Scott of the Antarctic (1948) a less ponderous paean if he had been allowed to explore Scott's character in more human detail, but it was a high-profile film of its day and chosen for the royal film performance of the year. He was more interesting as Bassett, the groom, in The Rocking Horse Winner (1950), and as the meek little protagonist in The History of Mr Polly (1949), both of which he produced. Years later he said, 'I wasn't a very good producer because I was always trying to get on the floor and I didn't really like the office work' (McFarlane, British Cinema, 415).

The 1950s are often regarded, perhaps unfairly, as a dullish decade in British cinema, with too many films dealing in Boy's Own fashion with the war. Certainly Mills came in for his share of these, but he nevertheless brought his effortless-seeming authority to bear in such wartime adventures as The Colditz Story (1955), Above Us the Waves (1955), I Was Monty's Double (1958), and Dunkirk (1958). During this period he was unobtrusively shading into character roles, in such films as The Long Memory (1952), as a man released after twelve years in prison for a murder he didn't commit; The End of the Affair (1955), as a shabby private detective; Tiger Bay (1959), the film that made an instant star of his younger daughter, Hayley, and in which he played the police superintendent; and, best of all the war-based adventures, Ice Cold in Alex (1958), as the captain battling alcoholism and north African minefields. Earlier in the decade his association with David Lean reached another peak with his perfect incarnation of the bootmaker Willie Mossop in Hobson's Choice (1954): in this Mills most effectively married the twin aspects of his screen image, as both little man and hero of a kind.

The British ‘new wave’ of the late 1950s and early 1960s passed Mills by, but he managed to give some of his most subtly honed performances in the character roles that prolifically did come his way. Two studies in resentful military types further attested to his protean abilities: his twitchy by-the-book lieutenant-colonel who clashes with the boisterous extrovert played by Alec Guinness in Tunes of Glory (1960) was a masterly study of neurotic repression; and two years later he mined some of this neurosis for social comedy in Tiara Tahiti (1962). His daughter Hayley's career was burgeoning rapidly and he directed her, though not with much success, in Sky West and Crooked (1966), from a screenplay by Mary Hayley Bell. Much more successful was The Family Way (1966), in which he played Hayley's father-in-law, and most movingly suggested that no relationship in his life had meant as much to him as that with his long-lost friend Billy.

Mills was in some poor films (with appearances in more than 100 films this was inevitable) and was sometimes miscast, as he was in War and Peace (1956), as a Russian peasant, or as an Australian cane-cutter in Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1959). Some would also say that his Oscar-winning turn as the village idiot in Lean's Irish-set romance, the tedious Ryan's Daughter (1970), was a triumph that owed more to cosmetic than to histrionic art. Nevertheless, he could give stature to such modest films as The Vicious Circle (1957) and could imbue cameo roles in ‘big’ films with a momentary presence, as he did in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (1996), as Old Norway, for whom Shakespeare had carelessly failed to provide dialogue. In his last film, Bright Young Things (2003), at the age of ninety-five, he was briefly vivid as a coke-snorting socialite. Throughout his long career in the British film industry he also continued to act on stage. Most memorably he and John Gielgud caused both outrage and hilarity with the profanities of their roles in Charles Wood's Veterans in 1972, the reactions to which he amusingly described in the television talk shows in which he frequently appeared in the 1990s and 2000s. No physical infirmity, including near-blindness towards the end, was allowed to stand in his way.

'The family way' might well describe the other path by which John Mills came to occupy such a secure place in filmgoers' affections and esteem. Both daughters, Juliet (b. 1941) and Hayley (b. 1946), went on to notable acting careers; his son Jonathan (b. 1949) was a screenwriter; while Mary Hayley Bell (1911–2005) continued to write, though she largely subordinated her aspirations to those of her husband and children. Born in Shanghai on 22 January 1911, the daughter of Francis Hayley Bell, an army officer and commissioner for maritime customs in China, and his American wife, Agnes (1878–1960), she was educated first by a governess, then at Malvern Girls' College and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She first appeared on stage in Shanghai in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1932) and subsequently in several roles on Broadway and in the West End. She stopped acting following her marriage to Mills and turned her attention to writing. Her first performed play, Men in Shadow (1942), with Mills starring, had a substantial success at London's Vaudeville Theatre, as did her most famous play, Duet for Two Hands (1945, at the Lyric), in which Mills played a maimed poet on whom a surgeon unwittingly grafts a murderer's hands. She gradually lost interest in writing plays when they proved difficult to place, and turned her attention to other forms. Her most acclaimed work was the novel Whistle Down the Wind (1958), which was attractively filmed in 1961 by Bryan Forbes, with Hayley as one of the children who mistakes an escaped convict for Jesus Christ. She also wrote an autobiography, What Shall We Do Tomorrow? (1968), and a book about the family dog in 1981. Above all she concentrated her attention on domestic matters, raising three children and maintaining a marriage of legendary happiness and longevity. She suffered from vascular dementia in later years, and like Mills she also lost her sight, but they managed to walk down the aisle in a renewal of their marriage vows in 2001. She died on 1 December 2005 at their home, Four Gables, Village Road, Denham, Buckinghamshire, of heart failure.

Mills had predeceased his wife on 23 April 2005, also at Four Gables, following a stroke. He had been made a CBE in 1960 and knighted in 1976; his memoir, Up in the Clouds, Gentlemen Please, was published in 1980, followed by Still Memories in 2000; but his greatest achievements are fortunately preserved in the films in which he made his name and on which he conferred such distinction.

Sources M. H. Bell, What shall we do tomorrow? (1968) Who's who in the theatre, 15th edn (1972) B. McFarlane, An autobiography of British cinema (1997) J. Mills, Up in the clouds, gentlemen please (1980) S. Granger, Sparks fly upward (1981) J. Mills, Still memories (2000) B. McFarlane, ed., The encyclopedia of British film (2003) G. Mayer, Roy Ward Baker (2004) B. McFarlane, Sight and Sound (June 2005) The Times (25 April 2005) Daily Telegraph (25 April 2005) The Guardian (25 April 2005) The Independent (25 April 2005) The Times (3 Dec 2005) [Mary Hayley Bell] The Guardian (5 Dec 2005) [Mary Hayley Bell] The Independent (5 Dec 2005) [Mary Hayley Bell] WW (2005) Burke, Peerage personal knowledge (2009) private information (2009) [Hayley Mills, daughter] b. cert. m. certs. d. cert. d. cert. [Mary Hayley Bell]

Crisso (talk) 11:46, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

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