Sir John Mills, the actor, died this last weekend aged 97.  Here is an excerpt of an obit for John Mills that appeared in today's Daily Express, a mass circulation newspaper here in the UK.

Brother Jonathan, a writer and producer, and the much longed for son who arrived almost five years after Hayley, didn't turn out to be all that his parents might have wished for. An expensive education at Millfield ended when he refused to take A levels or go to university. He spent six years as a production assistant for his father's friends, Stanley Kubrick and David Lean (even working on the film that won his father an Oscar, Ryan's Daughter), before wandering off in pursuit of enlightenment in the early Seventies as a follower of Guru Maharaji.

Two years later, he was back in Britain working on a building site and, after a failed marriage and the birth of his son Henry, went to work in a casino in New Jersey.

"I'm more financially secure than I've ever been, " he said at the time. "By ordinary standards I'm doing quite well: I've a good job, my own house and I'm only 31. It would have been nice for my father if I'd become a big name in showbusiness but I simply never had a burning desire to be an actor.

"It bothers me a bit that maybe I've been a disappointment to him. He's a smashing man: you could not find a nicer man on the face of the Earth."

The thespian drive may not have been there but what Jonathan seems to have passed on to his son, courtesy of grandad, is the ability to be "not boring".