Warren Mills Movies

Warren Mills was a comic actor who started out as a child actor in movies at age two, and went onto to a short-lived career while he was a young adult in the mid-'40s. Born in 1926, he was the son of the former Evelyn Eaton -- herself a former actress on-stage -- and Bob Mills, an insurance salesman; his aunt was the Ziegfeld star Mary Eaton. It was Evelyn, herself a former stage actress, who pushed all three of her children into performing; Warren Mills was cast in a film by 1928, and by age six he was playing small roles in Broadway productions, most notably in the topical play Winterset. By the time Mills was a teenager, he'd worked with the likes of Lillian Gish and Blanche Sweet on-stage, and smoothly made the transition as a working actor into juvenile roles. In 1946, he was cast in the best film role of his career when he was signed by producer Sam Katzman to be part of a group of young actors making a series of movies at Monogram. The team, known as the "Teen Agers," developed a cult following across eight movies that might best be described in modern terms as post-Henry Aldrich-type humor, with Mills providing the comic relief as Lee Watson, the bespectacled eccentric in the quintet. His career didn't outlast Katzman, Monogram, or the 1940s, however -- his persona, vaguely similar to that of Charles Smith (who also made a difficult transition to full adult roles), best known as Dizzy from the Henry Aldrich movies, may have just seemed too dated to producers and casting directors at the end of the decade, and Mills eventually gave up performing. He went into publicity work, and later married a New York socialite, but reportedly took his own life in the early '70s after a failed attempt at embarking on a career as an author. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide