John Mills: Sir John Mills, who has died aged 97, began his acting career in the theatre and returned quite frequently, and with distinction, to the stage in later years. But it was in the cinema that his energies were most often expended, and it is as a dependable British screen personality, over several decades and more than 100 movies, that he will primarily be remembered.
Mills was born in Felixstowe, Suffolk, the son of a mathematics teacher, grew up in Norfolk and worked briefly as a clerk before breaking into the theatre in 1929 in the chorus of a revue. A quality of everyday realism seemed to cling to his best performances, without detracting from his range.
The title of his 1981 autobiography, Up in the Clouds, Gentlemen Please, derived from a backstage direction in his revue days.
His gift for comedy may not often have been given full rein, but although he appeared in many routine films, his range as an actor went well beyond the military stereotypes with which he was perhaps too readily associated.
He made his first film, The Midshipmaid, in 1932 and before the war appeared in juvenile leads and subsidiary parts in numerous pictures. During the war, after being invalided out of the army, he made more substantial appearances in a variety of films, many of them service pictures such as In Which We Serve (1942), We Dive at Dawn (1943) and The Way to the Stars (1945).
To some extent these used him as a clean-cut officer-type, though not one devoid of irony or sensitivity.
But at the same period Waterloo Road (1944) showed him robustly at home in a working-class role, echoing his unpatronisingly drawn lower-deck character, Ordinary Seaman Shorty Blake, in In Which We Serve.
It was just after the war, however, with his Pip in David Lean's Great Expectations (1946), that Mills fully came into his own as a screen performer. The subtlety and variety of his playing were shortly to be seen again in two further literary adaptations, The History of Mr Polly (1949) and The Rocking Horse Winner (1950), both of which he produced.
Mills later recalled: "I wasn't a very good producer because I was always dying to get on the floor and didn't really like the office work." He suggested that Mr Polly did not succeed popularly at the time because "I was a blue-eyed hero up to then, and audiences hated seeing me as a little wizened chap with smarmed hair, being a henpecked husband. But I wanted to make those two movies and now I'm rather proud of them."
His "man on the run" in the thriller The Long Memory (1952) had a quality of grittiness more readily found in French and American cinema.
In 1944, reunited with Lean for the period comedy Hobson's Choice, he had provided a characterisation which had a representative blend of rumbustiousness and delicacy of detail. "It was the performance I have enjoyed most," he said later.
He enjoyed making Ice Cold in Alex (1958), despite the gruelling desert heat, but said with characteristically self-deprecating humour: "I was so disappointed in my love scene with Sylvia Syms. Up to then I had made love on the screen to virtually nothing but submarines and tanks and this was my big chance - and then most of it was cut out."
In 1960 came a full-blown, but far from self-indulgent, character study of a neurotically repressed army officer in Tunes of Glory opposite his friend of many years, Alec Guinness. The performance brought him the best actor prize at the Venice film festival.
In 1961 he appeared on Broadway in Terence Rattigan's play about TE Lawrence, Ross (a role Guinness had played in the West End). During the 1960s Mills gravitated, along with many other British actors of his generation, toward international movies, some of a less than distinguished sort. Often these were costume pictures about historical personages, ranging from Lady Hamilton (1967) to Lady Caroline Lamb (1972).
Mills never "went Hollywood", but he appeared in occasional American films, among them a role as a US cavalry officer in the western Chuka (1967). He even played in a western series on US TV, Dundee and the Culhane, as a British lawyer on the frontier. A more memorable TV venture came later, on home ground, in Quatermass 4 (1979).
He also directed one film, Sky West and Crooked (1965), a rural melodrama and a vehicle for his actor daughter, Hayley Mills, and written by his wife, Mary Hayley Bell. The film proved a commercial flop.
Hayley Mills had made her screen debut at 13 with her father in Tiger Bay (1959). However, her elder sister, Juliet, first appeared on screen as a three-month-old baby in In Which We Serve. Both would have successful acting careers.
Perhaps Mills's most worthwhile acting role at this time was in Bryan Forbes's King Rat (1965). In a prison camp setting Mills again delineated an outwardly correct figure succumbing to terminal strain.
In 1969 his caricature of Haig in Richard Attenborough's film of Oh! What a Lovely War had a florid skill, and the following year he was rewarded with the Academy Award for best supporting actor for his role as the village idiot in Lean's Ryan's Daughter, although the performance was not among his most notable.
During the 1970s he made several returns to the West End theatre, appearing opposite Judi Dench in a musical version of The Good Companions, in a revival of Separate Tables, and in Little Lies. He took supporting film roles as in the 1978 remake of The 39 Steps.
He was made a CBE in 1960 and knighted in 1976.
His last substantial role in the cinema was, incongruously, with Madonna in the comedy Who's That Girl? (1987), but even in these curious circumstances he showed that he had lost nothing of that practised ease which made him for so long such a durable presence in the British cinema's acting ranks.
Subsequently, he returned to cameo roles in films as diverse as the comedy Bean (1997) and Kenneth Branagh's all-star version of Hamlet (1996). He travelled the country in a one-man show of reminiscences. When the interval arrived, he was apt to confide in the audience that he was repairing for "a Mars bar and a Guinness".
He is survived by his wife; their two daughters; and a son, Jonathan Mills, a screenwriter.
John Lewis Ernest Mills: born February 22nd, 1908; died April 23rd, 2005