JOHN MILLS was the most English of actors, portraying on stage and in dozens of films characters of decency, loyalty, self-deprecation and quiet, understated courage. When a director wanted someone to personify “Englishness” Mills would be top of the list. The blue eyes, the cow’s lick of hair, which in early days fell regularly across his forehead, and his ability to convey a sense of honesty and resilience all saw to that.

In some areas he was overshadowed by his friends and contemporaries. Olivier had a glamour to which Mills could never aspire. In the classical roles Gielgud reigned supreme and this was a territory Mills rarely entered after playing Puck to Robert Helpmann’s Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Old Vic just before the war. Mills’s lack of inches lost him some of the drawing-room comedy parts claimed regularly by Rex Harrison.

All this Mills, the least jealous of actors, accepted without complaint. He was even prepared to give way to his own family. When, in 1959, he agreed to appear in the film Tiger Bay with his 12-year-old daughter, Hayley, he knew that he would be the loser and sure enough the critics came up with headlines such as “Little Miss Mills acts her father off the screen”.

One of the first people to spot Mills’s qualities was Noël Coward. At the start of his career Mills joined a repertory company called The Quaints on a tour of the Far East, where nightly they played everything from Hamlet to Young Woodley. Coward, holidaying in Singapore, saw The Quaints do Mister Cinders, a musical by Vivian Ellis (successfully revived at the King’s Head in London in 1983), and was much impressed by the juvenile lead, John Mills. Indeed, Coward liked the whole company, and for a couple of performances stood in for a sick actor, playing Stanhope to Mills’s Raleigh in R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End.

Coward remembered Mills and later knew just how to use him. Back in London, Coward wrote the song Mad Dogs and Englishmen for him. The role of Shorty Blake in In Which We Serve (1942) was created by Coward especially for Mills and became the first of a series of war heroes, which by the end of the 1940s had made him one of the most familiar faces in British cinema.

Mills used to refer, only half disparagingly, to these roles as his “up periscope!” period. He knew that he played them supremely well. He knew also that he was at his best when working with British writers and directors from the top drawer. Men like David Lean and Anthony Asquith drew from him his greatest screen performances; on stage he was likely to shine most brightly in Rattigan and Coward.

But there was, too, an ability to come up with the unexpected. In his mid-sixties Mills took the younger critics by surprise with a show-stopping tap dance in The Good Companions . The musical, concocted out of J. B. Priestley by André Previn, Johnny Mercer and Ronald Harwood, was scarcely worthy of that array of creative talent, but Mills delivered the goods, reminding those who had forgotten that he started his stage life as a hoofer and had not lost the art. Similarly, after playing a number of NCOs and flight lieutenants on screen he could put on rank and give a chilling performance as Field Marshal Haig in his friend Richard Attenborough’s Oh! What a Lovely War (1969).

Lewis Ernest Watts Mills was born in Suffolk, the son of a local headmaster. His mother had once aspired to be a professional dancer and taught her son some basic steps which were to be useful to him once he took to the boards. He was unhappy at Norwich High School, where his small stature made him prey to bullies, until he learnt some ju-jitsu and floored his tormentors. The story is told in his autobiography, racy and sentimental by turns, Up in the Clouds, Gentlemen Please (1980). He was good enough at games to get a trial with Norwich City, but the family preferred the safer option of a shipping clerkship with a local chandler. “Corn to corn”, Mills was apt to mutter later when playing in a bit of West End froth.

He did not stay long with the bales of grain and left for London and a job as a rep with Sanitas, which manufactured bathroom equipment. He was a rotten salesman, not least because he made all his calls in the morning in order to go to dancing class in the afternoon. In the latter he had the encouragement of his elder sister, Annette, who was to gain the devotion of a generation of children with Muffin the Mule on television. Mills was soon sacked by Sanitas, but he did get an engagement at the New Cross Empire with a young blonde, about to become famous for her remarkable cleavage, Frances Day.

Mills and Day could have been a double act. Both were offered jobs in the chorus of a Guy Bolton musical, The Five O’Clock Girl (1929), at the London Hippodrome. Mills accepted; but Day said no. Mills at the time saw himself as an English Fred Astaire, but when he joined The Quaints in 1929 he had to play everything from the Second Gravedigger in Hamlet to the title role in Young Woodley.

It was Coward’s influence when the company returned to London that got Mills his first West End lead: Lord Fancourt Babberly in Charley’s Aunt at the New Theatre. He was at the time the youngest actor to have tackled the role, and it is a tribute to his youthfulness and fitness that he played it again 24 years later, at the same theatre under John Gielgud’s direction. Coward cast Mills in his own play, Cavalcade, and in the following year, 1932, in his revue Words and Music.

Mills’s screen debut, also in 1932, required him to sing and dance (with Jessie Matthews) in The Midshipmaid. He made a quantity of films in the 1930s, most of which are now forgotten. An exception is Forever England (1935), based on C. S. Forester, where his performance as a plucky able seaman in the First World War possibly influenced Coward when he came to write In Which We Serve. There were regular West End roles, including a long run in Vivian Ellis’s Jill Darling (1934) where he had the hit number, I’m on a See-saw.

He was about to have something of a see-saw life himself. His marriage in 1932 to the actress Aileen Raymond was failing and he had met fleetingly a colonel’s daughter, Mary Hayley Bell. An adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1939) had given him his strongest West End role to date and Tyrone Guthrie invited him to join his Old Vic company. But Mills had played only a couple of roles there (including Puck) when war was declared.