John Mills

• Born: Feb 22, 1908 in Felixstowe, Suffolk, England
• Died: Apr 23, 2005 in Denham, England, UK
• Occupation: Actor, Director
• Active: '30s-'90s
• Major Genres: Drama, War
• Career Highlights: The Thief of Bagdad, In Which We Serve, Goodbye, Mr. Chips
• First Major Screen Credit: Nine Days a Queen (1934)

Biography

Born in a British seaside resort town, John Mills was the son of a mathematics teacher father. Mills' mother worked as a theatrical box office manager, and it was this world, rather than his father's academic milieu, which most attracted young Mills. After brief employment as a clerk in a corn merchant's office, Mills moved to London, where he enrolled at Zelia Raye's Dancing School. His first professional job was as a chorus dancer in The Five O'Clock Revue in 1929. Making as many contacts as possible, Mills was able to secure work on the legitimate stage, and in 1932 appeared in his first film, the Jessie Matthews vehicle The Midshipmaid. Learning his craft in "quota quickies," Mills rose to leading man in such prestige productions as Brown on Resolution (1935), Tudor Rose (1936), and The Green Cockatoo (1938). In 1939, he appeared in his first American film, Goodbye Mr. Chips, playing student Peter Colley. He starred in a number of morale-boosting World War II films, usually playing the personification of the calm, resourceful young British military officer; any chance for a real life career in uniform, however, was scuttled by Mills' duodenal ulcer. After the war, he starred in such international hits as Great Expectations (1946), Scott of the Antarctic (1949), Hobson's Choice (1954), and Above Us the Waves (1955). In 1970, Mills won a long overdue Oscar for his performance as the village idiot in Ryan's Daughter (1970), directed (as were several of Mills' earlier films) by David Lean. His Broadway work has included Ross, a 1961 dramatization of the life of T.E. Lawrence. In 1966, Mills directed Sky West and Crooked (aka Gypsy Girl), which starred his daughter, Hayley Mills, and was written by his wife, Mary Hayley Bell (Mills' other daughter, Juliet, is likewise an actress of note). One year later, he made his American series-TV debut as British attorney Dundee in the weekly Western Dundee and the Culhane. In 1977, John Mills was made a knight of the British Empire; his very full life, both offscreen and on, was summed up three years later in his autobiography Up in the Clouds, Gentlemen, Please. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

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(1806-73) Born in Pentonville, London, the first of six children by James Mill and Harriet Burrows, educated at home by his father in a gloomy and humourless environment, with occasional extramural assistance from Bentham and Francis Place, John Stuart began Greek at the age of 3, Latin at the age of 8—reading six of Plato's Dialogues before the age of 10—and chemistry and logic before the age of 12. He also acquired European languages, apparently quite easily, notably French and German. His domestic education was designed, above all else, to further the utilitarian creed and to make John Stuart the instrument of those reforms which Bentham and James Mill would not live to make themselves. The ‘poor boy’, as his dour father so patiently explained, was to be made ‘a successor worthy of both of us’. In fact, although he studied Roman law with John Austin, an important and much neglected utilitarian thinker, John Stuart did not read Bentham systematically until he was 15. And he was not finally converted to Benthamism until he became familiar with Dumont's French edition of Bentham's writings in 1821-2. After this, apart from full-time employment at India House, there followed four years of confident political activism, including the advocacy of birth control, parliamentary reform, and universal male suffrage. In 1826-7, John Stuart suffered a severe and seemingly endless nervous breakdown. After this experience, nothing was ever quite the same again. And three important shifts away from his earlier philosophic radicalism can easily be identified. (1) The first of these led to a fervent belief in self-culture and self-improvement and a corresponding move away from the typical Benthamite indifference to personal character. John Stuart's new or revised utilitarianism was now squarely based on an ethic of self-culture and not at all on hedonism, and it derived its inspiration, in part at least, from Coleridge and the European romantics. The famous essay On Liberty of 1859 argues that a concern for personal character also meant the scrutiny of self-regarding conduct. The liberty principle itself required a disinterested concern to improve individual conduct and character. Like Wordsworth, Mill had come to the view that progress would only take place once the ‘inward passions’ and not merely ‘outward arrangements’ had been cultivated and developed. (2) The second shift is a little more elusive perhaps, but equally important. After the breakdown, John Stuart became increasingly concerned to promote agreement by avoiding an appeal to first or final principles. Now he preferred instead to recommend secondary or intermediate maxims capable of inspiring broad agreement. Even the System of Logic (1843) was conceived and written to avoid provoking philosophical controversy. And while the Logic could hardly be described as neutral, since it was an uncompromising defence of the inductive school in science, Mill thought that logic was an area upon which the most diverse of philosophic partisans could meet and join hands. In short, after the breakdown John Stuart counted very much on consensus, not just in philosophical discourse, but also in political practice. His view now was that the instructed or educated few had the crucial task of maintaining and developing a considered agreement amongst themselves. Without that agreement, political stability was less likely and clear, intellectual authority would either be diminished or lost entirely. (3) The third and final shift of ideas and belief was towards a quiet and contemplative ‘toryism’. After the breakdown, John Stuart acquired an enduring concern for national character, as well as a strong distaste for those cultures, like the English and American, which were dominated by money-grubbing and by competition for material gain. What mattered more and more to him, was strong authority and noble ideals and this occasionally issued as an irritable and aristocratic disdain for the prosaic nature of the ordinary man. But no one ought to doubt his contempt for the usual English conservative. As a Liberal MP for the Westminster constituency, he was charged in the House of Commons with having said that all conservatives were stupid. He denied this, replying that what he had said was that all stupid people were conservative.

Mill was the leading liberal feminist of his day. He wrote The Subjection of Women (1869)—the only one of his books that was not a commercial success—and proposed an amendment to the Reform Bill of 1867 to substitute ‘person’ for ‘man’. It failed, but got 73 votes. As with On Liberty, Mill stated that his views on the emancipation of women were deeply influenced by his wife, Harriet Taylor. His intellectual relationship with his wife was very similar to Condorcet's with Sophie de Grouchy. It enabled those who disagreed with the two books to put them down to his wife's meddling.

— John Halliday

Mill, John Stuart (1806-73). Utilitarian and liberal philosopher. The son of James Mill, a disciple of Jeremy Bentham, Mill was converted to Benthamite utilitarianism at the age of 15, but later rejected its egoistic psychology and mechanical concept of pleasure. He was employed for 35 years by the East India Company, afterwards serving as an independent member of Parliament for Westminster (1865-8), arguing for radical measures such as votes for women. In On Liberty (1859) Mill wrote the most celebrated defence of individual freedom to appear in the English language.

Mill, John Stuart (1806-73) English philosopher and economist, and the most influential liberal thinker of the 19th century. As the son of James Mill, John Stuart was given an intensive private education, in which he began Greek at the age of three, and Latin (and six of the Dialogues of Plato) at the age of eight (Mill himself remarks that the Theaetetus might have been a little much for him). As a teenager he was immersed in his father's philosophical and political interests until a nervous breakdown at the age of twenty led to a revaluation, and softening, of his Benthamite position. Thereafter, influenced by Saint-Simon and others, Mill maintained a more sophisticated appreciation of the historical forces moulding peoples' ideas, and a less cynical view of the forces of reaction. From 1831 his friendship with the married Harriet Taylor was central to Mill's life; in 1849 after the death of her husband they married. In general philosophy, Mill was an empiricist whose aim was to construct a genuine system of empirical knowledge for use in social and moral affairs as much as in science. To this end he set about rescuing the doctrine from its sceptical, Humean associations. His major discussion of the foundations of knowledge and inference is the System of Logic (1843), whose six books treat of deductive inference in general, mathematical knowledge, induction (see Mill's methods), observation, abstraction and classification, fallacies, and finally social, political, and moral sciences. His distinctions, between connotation and denotation, and between general and singular terms, influenced the later semantics of Frege (who, however, roundly rejected his empiricist ‘pebble and gingerbread’ view of arithmetic); while his work on induction is still the foundation of methodologies of discovering causal laws. As in his later Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865), Mill's project is that which has subsequently been called naturalized epistemology: the attempt to understand mental operations as the upshot of known laws of psychology working on the data of experience.

In ethics, Mill is best remembered for his Utilitarianism (1861 in Fraser's Magazine, 1863 as a separate publication), and On Liberty (1859). Each is a classic of its kind, although Utilitarianism suffers a Victorian strain in its combination of hedonism with distinctions of quality between pleasures, as well as an uneasy blend of act-utilitarian and rule-utilitarian elements (see utilitarianism). It was the principal target of all subsequent critics of utilitarianism, and especially the idealists Green and Bradley. On Liberty is the classic defence of the principle of freedom of thought and discussion, arguing that the ‘sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection’. Among his other works, Mill wrote Principles of Political Economy (1848), and The Subjection of Women (1861, published in 1869).

Mill, John, 1645–1707, English clergyman and biblical scholar. The masterpiece of scholarly critical work to which 30 years of his life were devoted is an edition (1707) of the Greek New Testament. Dr. John Fell, bishop of Oxford, encouraged Mill to undertake the task, giving over his own notes and assuming the expense of printing.

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