Up in the Clouds, At Last: Sir John Mills, 1908-2005

It’s not often that an actor’s death warrants tributes from both Buckingham Palace and Parliament. Sir John Mills, who died 23 April at 97, may have acted in over 100 films, but it was his behind-the-scenes roles — devoted husband and father, loyal friend, and statesman — that defined him.

His universal appeal afforded Mills legions of fans. Among his most devoted was his wife of 64 years, actress and playwright Mary Bell. He performed in two of her more successful plays, Men in Shadow (1942) and Duet for Two Hands (1945), and they renewed their vows in 2001 when she was afflicted with Alzheimer’s. “I am madly in love with her, you see,” Mills explained at the ceremony.

Such commitment is paralleled, though hardly supplanted, by Mills’ long-term dedication to his work. His life reads much like that of a character in one of his wartime films: average bloke succeeds through determination, hard work, and luck. Inspired by his sister Annette, a dancer, Sir John started out as a chorus boy at the London Hippodrome. He caught his first big break while touring in Singapore with a troupe, when he was recruited by Noel Coward (whom Mills dubbed “Master”), to appear in In Which We Serve. Here Mills formed his critical lifetime partnerships with co-director David Lean and close friend Lord Richard Attenborough, who would direct Mills in Gandhi (1981) and serve as producer on Young Winston (1972). Attenborough recently said of Mills, “There was no one comparable. He gave such a variety of impeccable performances. He was adored by people he worked with.”

Though Mills’ dramatic range was impressive, early on, he was typecast as a stiff-lipped military officer in wartime propaganda films. Invalided from an ulcer and unable to serve in WWII, he acted the part of the British officer in over a dozen war movies, including After We Dive at Dawn (1943), Waterloo Road (1944) and The Way to the Stars (1945). Mills’ role as the feisty Pip in Lean’s Great Expectations (1945) helped him break out of the military mold, a shift more fully realized in the next decade.

In Hobson’s Choice (1954), Mills tested his comedic talents, as dopey, loveable Willie Mossop. Mills said of this role, his second collaboration with Lean, “It was the performance I have enjoyed most. Willie Mossop was a wonderful part, an unglamorous chap, but he was a hero.” From there, Mills went on to perform in perhaps his most controversial role, that of Captain Anson in Ice-Cold in Alex (1958), an alcoholic assigned to transport a Nazi (Anthony Quayle) across the Libyan dessert. After a physically demanding shoot, the film’s release was delayed by censors who claimed Mills’ love scene with Sylvia Sims was “too risqué.” Pushing the envelope a bit farther, Sir John played Jacko Palmer, a British working class union leader who advocates for the promotion of a black laborer to foreman, in Flame in the Streets (1961). Inspired by the Notting Hill riots of 1959, the film is an exposé of racial prejudice and class tension in England.

Though he took on more diverse roles throughout the ’50s and ’60s, Mills also continued to act in war movies, like Dunkirk (1958) and Tunes of Glory (1960), opposite Sir Alec Guinness. As he had a reputation for all these military roles, MGM executives were concerned when Lean decided to cast him as the disfigured and simple mute in Ryan’s Daughter (1970). Mills spent time with brain-damaged patients to prepare, and in the end, he was rewarded by an Oscar win for Best Supporting Actor.

As the title of his 1980 autobiography, Up in the Clouds, Gentlemen Please, suggests, Mills remained humbled by his good fortune. And he never did “go Hollywood,” opting instead for the stage, his first love, and steady work in England. (Of his home, he once said, “I love it here, and my wife and I wouldn’t be happy anywhere else. So if I lived in Hollywood, I would simply be rich and unhappy. What’s the point in that?”) On stage, he performed in musicals such as The Good Companions (1974), where he did an impressive tap routine, and later as the lead in a 1982 musical of Goodbye Mr. Chips (the film version originally helped to launch his career in 1939).

Mills also acted in variety of television roles. He had bit parts as Bette Davis’s husband in Agatha Christie’s Murder with Mirrors (1985) and Dr. Watson in Sherlock Holmes in the Masks of Death (1984). More famously, he played plucky professor Bernard Quatermass in the final installment of the sci-fi series, Quatermass (think A Clockwork Orange meets The X-Files), which aired in the late ’70s.

Like Quartermass, Mills remained active in his old age. In an interview with David Frost for BBC in 2002, Sir John had this to say of retiring: “I open the paper in the morning and I read the obituary column. If I’m not in it, I get up. I think I shall keep on getting up.” Even as he began to lose his sight, Mills kept acting. His last film role was a coke-snorting snob in Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things (2003). Like Attenborough, Fry became a good friend and admirer, visiting Mills frequently in his final days. “To say the end of an era is always a cliché,” Fry said after Mills’ death. “But he was the last of a particular generation, not just of actors, but of Englishmen to whom modesty was more important than ego.”