Sir John Mills

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 7 May 2000

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Sir John Mills. He was only six when he decided he wanted to be an actor. And now after seventy years in show business he is still touring the world with his one man show. It was the war which made him a star and the films he made then eventually led to Hollywood. There he made friends with Laurence Olivier, Rex Harrison and Noel Coward, to whom he says he owes a great debt.

He won an Oscar for his performance in Ryan's Daughter, but one of his favourite films remains Ice Cold in Alex. In it, he got to kiss Sylvia Sims, a scene which was later cut by the censor for showing too much of her cleavage and which had to be reshot with only three buttons undone instead of four.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: All the Things You Are by Chick Henderson Book: The Warden by Anthony Trollope Luxury: His piano

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in the year 2000, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is an actor, the fact that he's always been convinced that he didn't look a day over 30 probably explains why he's still going strong at the age of 92.
0:40.0	Charm, durability, and above all an effortless talent have made him one of the great British
0:45.5	stars of the century.
0:47.5	It was 55 years ago that he first came to fame in David Leen's film Great Expectations. After that, in a series of roles that seemed
0:55.3	to embody Englishness, his stiff upper lip was admired by millions. In which we serve,
1:01.2	ice cold in Alex, oh what a lovely war and young Winston,
1:05.0	were just a few of them.
1:06.4	But just in case we thought he was type-cast,
1:08.8	he carried off an Oscar as the village idiot in Ryan's daughter. He's still doing one man shows because as he says
1:15.8	none of my life has been work. It's my hobby. He is Sir John Mills.
1:20.9	What a lucky man you are, Sir John. Does performing still excite you as much
1:25.2	as ever it did?
1:26.2	Yes, I am a lucky man. Very lucky indeed, Touchwood, D.B. because I am able to go on doing what I really love doing and that's walking onto the stage.
1:38.0	But what is it that is exciting for you? Is it the desire to please or do you want to be admired or?
1:45.0	It's to do with having the luck to know at the age of five or six that I had to be an actor. I just knew I had to be one.
1:56.0	How did you know? I don't know. My sister of course Annie was a great influence in my life and she was much older so she became a sort of heroin
2:06.6	and she started our baby and a wonderful ballet dancer and then she took up exhibition dancing when it was very popular and there were three couples.
2:15.8	There were the stairs, Sae Ellen Mills and the councils.
2:19.6	And of course I did get up from the schoolhouse once to see her dance.
2:23.0	She was see Ellen Mills.
	...

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