One big, happy family
Patrick Skene Catling
STILL MEMORIES by John Mills Hutchinson, £20, pp. 208 That most lovable and loving of luvvies, Lewis Ernest Watts Mills — Sir John Mills — rejoices in a special place at the summit of England's acting establishment. He has been up there longer than anyone else. He first appeared on the stage 71 years ago. At the turn of this century his one-man show was still in demand; English audiences, at least their senior members, are loyal; and he was still able to perform, although, at the age of 92, he is almost totally blind.
Not only has he been awarded an Oscar as well as a knighthood, he has achieved a success most rare in show business: he has been married to the same woman for 59 years. Colleagues and other friends refer to him as part of a team, `Johnnie-and-Mary'. This handsome album of photographs, with a succinct explanatory text by Sir John, is a celebration of extraordinary endurance and joie de vivre.
John's father gave him his first camera, a Kodak Box Brownie, when he was 12, and he has been a fanatical amateur photogra- pher ever since. His son Jonathan last year, in the Mlllses' Denham attic, discovered over 5,000 transparencies thought to have been lost, and went on to collect more than 10,000 pictures, from which decorative selections have been made. 'If he hadn't been an actor,' Jonathan writes, 'it is quite obvious that he could have made a success- ful career as a cameraman.'
More Karsh than Cartier-Bresson, John Mills almost always shows his subjects at their carefully posed, favourably lighted best. He takes family snaps de luxe, of a movie studio's complimentary flawlessness, and he portrays professional associates with familial affection. To Mills, all show- biz seems to have been one big, happy fam- ily. Jonathan lists some of his father's 'close friends': Noel Coward, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Rex Harrison, David Niven, James Mason, Frank Sinatra, David Lean, Walt Disney, Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn, Montgomery Clift, Richard Atten- borough, Danny Kaye, Bob Hope, Tyrone Power, John Gielgud . . . . They and even more are all in this book, and they certainly look very friendly.
Lord Attenborough, in a glowing fore- word, recalls that when he first met Mills, 67 years ago,
his fame was such that he found it impossible to attend any showbiz event without police protection for fear of being mobbed. And, year after year, embodying all the character- istics which the British most admire in a screen hero, he was overwhelmingly voted our most popular male star.
Johnnie, in turn, pays tribute to Dickie as 'my greatest friend'. This is an anthology of encomiums: Errol Flynn — an 'absolute charmer'; Tyrone Power — 'an incredibly generous man'; Joan Greenwood — `delectable'; Charles Laughton — 'fascinat- ing': Angela Lansbury — 'wonderful actress'; James Mason — 'enormous charm'; Lord Mountbatten — 'absolutely charming' (after John played Shorty Blake in In Which We Serve, Mountbatten made him an honorary member of HMS Kelly's ship's company); and so on, even 'wonder- ful Kodachrome'. Mills expresses little neg- Mills and Gielgud in Veterans at the Royal Court, 1972. ative criticism, and then only gently: Robert Newton was 'having a little trouble with the vino' and Stewart Granger 'became his usual tricky self.
There is an abundance of well-polished anecdotage. There's the story about the time at a London charity dinner when he was seated apart from his wife and wrote her a note, 'Darling, did I remember to tell you that I Jove you?' — and the headwaiter delivered it by mistake to the guest of hon- our, Princess Diana. There was the time when David Lean asked Mills, Do you think you could play a village idiot?' 'David, that's type-casting!' Mills replied. His broad caricature of Irish idiocy in Ryan's Daughter won his Oscar. Then there was the time when he did his fart trick, not as a village idiot, at David Niven's place. 'I was quite famous for lighting farts,' Mills relates, brushing modesty aside. 'This one time ... the flame I ignited was like a Bunsen burner — a foot long and blue. Sensational. Niven laughed so much he had to be taken to hospital.'
But perhaps the most sensational high- light of the book is Mary Mills's sneak shot of Laurence Olivier, full disclosure, back view, nude, on a hotel balcony in the South of France. What we have here is 20th-century theatre's summum bottom. As John Mills says in that great Carlsberg commercial, after a thirsty ordeal in the desert in Ice Cold in Alex, 'Worth waiting for!'
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