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The following year Mills had good roles in the film versions of James Hilton’s SO WELL REMEMBERED and Eric Ambler’s THE OCTOBER MAN (Juliet appeared briefly in each as his daughter). And he directed the stage production of his wife’s play Angel, which opened in June ’47.

He then made his first trip to the US – a junket to promote GREAT EXPECTATIONS. He says that while he was here he was offered the role Bogart subsequently played in THE AFRICAN QUEEN, and that Bette Davis was offered the part Hepburn later did. “I was then under contract to the Rank Organization,” Mills says, “and they didn’t think Spiegel offered enough for my services. So the negotiations came to nothing. I was also offered the starring role in Neville Shute’s No Highway, which James Stewart subsequently played in the film called NO HIGHWAY IN THE SKY.”

However, when he got back to England he obtained one of the great roles of his career: the title part in SCOTT OF THE ANTARCTIC. His wife wrote a substantial part of the dialogue for that excellent bio-flim and in her autobiography (What Shall We Do Tomorrow) she remarks that “it was curious how closely the actors resembled the actual people – no doubt the clothes helped a great deal.” Several who had known Robert Falcon Scott averred that Mills did resemble him SCOTT OF THE ANTARCTIC was creatively photographed in color – mostly it Norway – by Jack Cardiff. Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote a score for it that’s a filmusic classic. Charles Frend directed.

Like all too many actors, Mills took a fling at producing – after he finished work on SCOTT OF THE ANTARCTIC. He produced two films, and acted in both of them. They were directed by Anthony Pelissier. Neither was profitable.

The first was a cinemation of H. G. Wells’ THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY, which was published in ’09 and is Wells’ most amusing novel. Pelissier wrote the screenplay, and Mills was wholly explicable as the draper’s clerk who marries, on the rebound, a shrewish and slatternly cousin, leaves her, and takes up with a plump and jolly keeper of an inn. But in ’49 it all seemed unimportant. And Mills had had problems during its production. Some of these had to do with weather, but the worst of them had to do with the trade unions that do so much to stifle cinematic creativity. “One day,” Mills says, “I found myself having to refuse, as an actor, to work for myself as a producer, and having to watch costs spiraling because the leading man was on strike.”

The second film Mills produced was THE ROCKING HORSE WINNER, which was based on a story by D. H. Lawrence. Mills has only a subsidiary, character part in it, for the action centers upon a sensitive boy who is dangerously disturbed, in his fashionable London home, by the tensions arising from the extravagances and debts of his luxury-loving mother and improvident father. Driven by anxieties he can feel but not define, the boy goes in for frenzied spells of riding his rocking horse, in the course of which he foretells the outcome of horse races not yet run, and thereby enables his mother to get the money she seems to need above everything. Pelissier also wrote this script, and directed with outstanding finesse. He also got an exceptional musical score out of William Alwyn, and an astonishing performance out of John Howard Davies (as the boy). Mills says he doesn’t know what subsequently happened to Davies, who had also been exceptionally good in OLIVER TWIST.

“When Carol Reed heard we were going to do THE ROCKING HORSE WINNER,” says Mills, “he offered us some tips on working with child actors. He said he first always hired talented adult actors and rehearsed them thoroughly, with himself reading the part of the child. Then when he felt the adult actors were content with their roles he brought in the child. ‘It becomes every man for himself,’ Reed said, ‘and the director can stand back and watch the slow, but steady, disintegration of the grown-up players’.”

The two films Mills produced are distinguished ones and deserve a permanent place in Britain’s film heritage. Had they succeeded commercially I think Mills would have made a contribution to cinema as a producer as great as the one he has made as an actor.

He returned to working in films produced by others via indifferent programmers, until David Lean cast him as Willie Mossop, the slave whom a loving and determined woman transforms into a man, in HOBSON’S CHOICE. Based on a play that had been a favorite of the English provincial stage for generations, it was shrewdly directed by Lean, with a wealth of Lancashire atmosphere. Mills’ performance is truly creative and is thought by many to be the best of his career. Brenda de Banzie is almost as creative as the spinster who marries and transforms him but Charles Laughton, as the dominating Lancashire boot-maker, hams unnecessarily.

In the next two years Mills was in no less than eight films, performing roles that ranged from the military types in THE COLDITZ STORY and ABOVE US THE WAVES to the farceurs in IT’S GREAT TO BE YOUNG and THE BABY AND THE BATTLESHIP, not to mention such skillful cameos as those in King Vidor’s WAR AND PEACE (Pierre’s cellmate) and Michael Todd’s AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS (the London cabbie who delays Phileas Fogg in the final few miles of his world tour).

Since then Mills played a supporting role in order to help launch his daughter Hayley in her screen debut in TIGER BAY (he is the police inspector who tries to get her to betray a murderer). In SUMMER OF THE SEVENTEENTH DOLL, which was made in Australia, he provides the counterweight that Ernest Borgnine, much inferior actor, always needs. He “played against type” in TUNES OF GLORY, as did Alec Guinness, with equal lack of success. He stooged for Hayley in THE CHALK GARDEN and THE TRUTH ABOUT SPRING. He strove with Ralph Richardson, and other to save THE WRONG BOX from being totally unfunny. He gave an exceptionally skillful performance as the hard-drinking father in THE FAMILY WAY (in which Hayley is his daughter-in-law). The last-named role is Mills’ favorite of all his performances.

Except for his retired colonel in RUN WILD, RUN FREE, and his Chancy-like rendering of the village idiot in RYAN’S DAUGHTER, Mills other recent screen appearances leave something to be desired, chiefly because of inane scripts and second-rate directors (e.g., OH! WHAT LOVELY WAR; A. BLACK VEIL FOR LISA CHUKA; AFRICA – TEXAS STYLE). The success of his RYAN’S DAUGHTER part incidentally, is not all due to makeup. Watch it closely and you will see Mills is expending a vitality, and deploying acting techniques, with out which the exaggerated make-up would have been a bore.

The one stage performance for which Mills is known in the US is his portrayal of T. E. Lawrence in Terence Rattigan’s Ross, which opened on Broadway in December ’61 (Guinness had played the part in London). It concerns the Lawrence who was seeking anonymity, and oblivion, in the Royal Air Force. Mill hadn’t been on the stage for seven years but he enabled the play to have a successful run on Broadway.

“Rattigan’s lines emphasized the esthetic, the dreamer, aspects of Lawrence,” Mills told me, “but I emphasized the physical man, the tough man of action. The Lawrence of the film was a totally different character. O’Toole was very good, although he is almost too tall to play Lawrence, who in actuality was very short, which made his physical feats all the more impressive to Arab chieftains, who are tall men. But the film’s intention was wholly different from the play’s. Lean set out to make an epic, and he succeeded.”

Mills’ television work began, surprisingly, not in Britain but in the US, in the version of Maugliam’s The Letter, that William Wyler, who was also making his tv debut, produced in October ’56. In ’62 Mills played a tough British officer stationed on Cyprus in The Interrogator for “The DuPont Show of the Week”; in ’67 he played an English lawyer in the US West of the late 1800s in the teleseries called “Dundee and the Culhane,” which ran only 13 weeks. And last year he played in a segment of Julet’s teleseries (“Nanny and the Professor”). Says Mills: “She gave me the part and didn’t ask for the ten percent agent’s fee”

Mills has directed one motion picture: SKY WEST AND CROOKED – called GYPSY GIRL in the US – which starred Hayley. It was written by Mrs. Mills (who had also written WHISTLE DOWN THE WIND for Hayley).

Mills and his wife live in a 200-year-old house atop Richmond Hill in Surrey and can see the Thames from their bedroom window. Said Mrs. Mills in the closing lines of her autobiography: “There is only one hurt for Johnnie and me. The rooms are empty. For they, whose laughter echoed across the garden, and down the corridors, have all grown up.”

Early this year a doorman of London restaurant slammed the door of a taxi from which Mr. and Mrs Mills had just emerged. Mills’ hand was not clear of the jamb. One of his fingers was severed and three others were crushed. A replant of the severed finger was successful.

This fall Mills is to star in a West End revival of Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version.

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