An appealing everyman and dutiful soldier

Sir John Mills, a distinguished actor who excelled on camera, died at his home in Denham, west of London, on Saturday. He was 97.

He won 1971's Academy Award for best supporting actor as the deaf-mute village idiot in the David Lean epic Ryan's Daughter.

"It was weird," Mills once said. "I just thought I'd been wasting my time for the past 55 years learning all these millions of lines, and then getting an Oscar for not speaking."

Boyishly handsome, he often portrayed guileless, wounded heroes and became one of the reigning British leading men of the 1940s and 1950s.

Mills appeared in more than 100 movies, sometimes with his two daughters, Hayley and Juliet Mills. Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in 1976.

In an extensive and prolific career on stage and screen, he performed alongside both Noel Coward and Madonna. Through his mentor, Coward, he also came to work closely with Lean.

The Mills-Lean collaborations included wartime dramas such as In Which We Serve (1942) and This Happy Breed (1944), Coward;s drama about working-class endurance.

They worked on Great Expectations (1946), in which Mills played Pip in a haunting versio-n of the Charles Dickens tale.

From the late 1940s, he expanded further into character roles, usually playing off an aspect of his stoic, working-class on-screen identity.

He was the noble, doomed adventurer Robert F. Scott in Scott of the Antarctic (1948) and an alcoholic but resolute Army captain in Ice Cold in Alex (1958).

Two films in 1960 demonstrated his ability to convey both decency, as the patriarch in Swiss Family Robinson, and steady decline, as the unbalanced lieutenant colonel opposite Alec Guinness in Tunes of Glory.

Late acts

He continued to act into the 1990s, despite the onset of blindness.

He was an eccentric real estate magnate in the Madonna comedy Who's That Girl? (1987), Jack the Ripper in Deadly Advice (1993) and Old Norway in Kenneth Branagh's filming of Hamlet (1996).

Lewis Ernest Watts Mills was born in Felixstowe, England, on February 22, 1908. His father was a mathematics instructor, and his mother was a former box-office manager of London's Theatre Royal Haymarket.

Encouraged by his mother and sister, he began appearing in local productions. But his father and paternal grandfather intervened and insisted on a career in business.

After clerking briefly at the corn merchant's exchange, he was bored and left at age 19 to study dance. To earn money, he sold toilet tissue.

His dancing teacher recommended him for a chorus part in the hit 1929 production The Five O'Clock Girl at London's Hippodrome Theatre. He soon joined a touring repertory troupe, the Quaints, and embarked for Asia.

By his account, the Quaints were a bizarre cluster of performers. Some actors would forget their lines and cause the company to transition into another play entirely.

In Singapore one night, the lead actor in Hamlet got drunk, and at the last minute the cast decided to do a light comedy with Mills in the lead.

Coward, in the audience and expecting to see Hamlet, was delighted when Mills made a quick entrance on roller skates and proceeded unintentionally to somersault and crash-land on his back. Back in London, Coward picked Mills for a secondary lead in his hailed musical drama Cavalcade and then Words and Music.

Serious role

But Mills did not want to be typecast as a song-and-dance man. With the help of friend Laurence Olivier, he became a member of the esteemed Old Vic company and performed Shakespeare.

After that experience, he won plaudits in 1939 as the cynical George in a stage production of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. To give George a New York accent, Mills sat through 17 screenings of the James Cagney crime drama Angels With Dirty Faces.

Mills's movie career was enhanced by British laws spurring domestic film production. His first big contact with American audiences came when he played a fresh-faced pupil in the popular Goodbye, Mr Chips (1939).

He credited Coward with the decision to turn down a long-term Hollywood contract in the early 1930s and work hard in the British theatre to mature as a performer.

It was a tough call at the time, but Mills said he was grateful for Coward's advice, which helped him master the difficult character parts that dominated his career for 50 years.

He served briefly in the Royal Engineers during Second World War until a duodenal ulcer resulted in his discharge in 1942. He then returned to the stage.

Besides Great Expectations, he played the conscientious mill-town newspaper editor in So Well Remembered (1947) and the commander of an imperiled submarine in Morning Departure (1950).

He went on to play a notorious general who sends soldiers to their slaughter in Oh! What a Lovely War (1969) and the British viceroy in Gandhi (1982).

Mills, whose marriage to actress Aileen Raymond ended in divorce, was renowned for the length and strength of his second marriage, to playwright Mary Hayley Bell.

They married in 1941 and renewed their wedding vows in 2001, when she was suffering from Alzheimer's and he was mostly blind. When some wag suggested the marriage might not last, Mills said, "The first 60 years are the worst, so we're hoping to push on from here."

Survivors include his wife, their two daughters and a son.

Factfile
Glorious career

• His first big break came in 1946 when he played Pip in a film version of Charles Dickens's novel Great Expectations.
• His favourite movie was the 1960 production Tunes of Glory in which he co-starred with Alec Guinness, and for which he won best actor award at the Venice Film Festival.
• He won an Oscar in 1971 for his supporting role as a village idiot in Ryan's Daughter, directed by David Lean.
• He had a role in pop star Madonna's 1987 film Who's that Girl?.
• He made his final film appearance in 2003 in Bright Young Things, directed by British comedian Stephen Fry, in which, at the age of 95, he had a cameo role as a man snorting cocaine at a party.
  
  "I just thought I'd been wasting my time for the past 55 years learning all these millions of lines, and then getting an Oscar for not speaking."