There's no denying that Hayley Mills — the blonde, plucky, ebullient British actress — is a legend.
Ever since she catapulted to stardom by playing identical twins in Disney's 1961 blockbuster The
Parent Trap, Mills has been a household name. But what's she been up to in the years since then?
For the 60th anniversary of Pollyanna, Hayley Mills took a nostalgic journey
through her storied Disney career with D23. As a child, Mills acted in six Disney movies,
including Pollyanna, a story of a radically optimistic orphan girl who lives with a
wealthy aunt in a small town. Among her happy memories from the Pollyanna set,
the actress recalled spotting some delicious-looking American-style
donuts — a novelty for an English girl — out of the corner of her eye while trying to do a scene.
"And as the morning wore on, I got more and more hungry [...]"
Mills also reminisced about her experience filming The Parent Trap,
another Disney movie that made her famous, sharing that she and her
double used to go out to eat in costume and, quote, "pretend to be real twins."
Reminiscing about her impressive beginnings with Disney, Mills said,
"It represents formative years of my life and it's deeply embedded in my
heart. I was so fortunate to have that start with this wonderful man and his wonderful studio."
She said that Pollyanna was a wonderful start to her career.
"How great to start my career with a film like that, with actors like that."
The year 1966 was a scandalous one for Mills. She debuted her first nude scene
in the comedy The Family Way. However, that was nothing compared to the fact
that 19-year-old Mills took up with Roy Boulting, the film's 52-year-old director.
The affair made jaws drop, not only because of the couple's 33-year age difference,
but also because Boulting was married with children.
Mills, however, didn't see their age difference as an issue at the time.
She later told A&E,
"The fact that he was considerably older was probably part of the attraction,
but not consciously. [...] And having spent an awful lot of time with people
much older than myself [...] it didn't seem particularly odd or peculiar to me."
Despite all the controversy, Mills and Boulting were married from 1971 to 1977;
their son, Crispian, was born in 1973.
After meeting actor Leigh Lawson, Mills divorced Boulting and had a son,
Jason, with Lawson before they split in 1984.
A few years later, Mills met Indian-American actor Firdous Bamji , who is 20 years her junior.
The two wed in 1997, and, over two decades later, the marriage is still going strong.
Mills first dipped a toe in the thriller genre as a murder-witnessing child in Tiger Bay.
In 1964, she starred in The Chalk Garden, playing a disturbed teenager navigating a
relationship with her even more disturbed governess.
By 1968, she was, quote, "ready to leave her Disney years behind, and present a new,
sensuous image on screen," as her A&E biography put it. That year, she starred in Twisted Nerve,
an early psychosexual thriller. She played a young woman who is stalked by a homicidal maniac.
The New York Times called the film, quote, "an embarrassing picture [and] a sour-tasting mess,"
yet it's hard to look away from the movie's campy but compelling trailer.
In 1975, she starred in Deadly Strangers, which tells the story of a beautiful,
disturbed girl who becomes involved, in all innocence, with two disturbed,
perverted young men who intend to do her harm.
Even though Mills was almost universally adored by the 1970s, stardom was not easy
for her — particularly as she began to age out of the little-girlish pluckiness of her early teens.
In the wake of her success in The Parent Trap, she became besieged by all the normal doubts
of adolescence — but the pressures of fame exacerbated them. She began to struggle with
weight and body image issues, first in the form of over-eating, and then in the form of bulimia.
She explained it in her official A&E biography, saying,
"I adored food, and I'm in front of the camera, but my face is like a balloon. So you start to
throw up, basically. And you just get more and more insecure about yourself, and don't tell
anybody. And, of course, I thought I was the only person in the world who had ever thought of it."
Mills also spoke about her experience with bulimia in a 1997 interview with the Toronto Sun,
explaining that the disorder had lasted all the way up to the birth of her first child.
Since the 1960s, Mills has made regular appearances on television. In addition to
several cameos, she famously starred in Good Morning, Miss Bliss, which would later be
integrated into the hit program Saved by the Bell. She also starred in the BAFTA -nominated TV series
The Flame Trees of Thika, about World War I era British settlers living in Kenya.
In contemporary TV land, however, she's probably most well known for her role in the hit UK series
Wild at Heart — not to be confused with the David Lynch film of the same name.
Wild at Heart ran from 2006 to 2012. Like The Flame Trees of Thika before it,
it concerned a British family living in Africa — this time,
her TV family attempted to practice veterinary medicine on the grounds of a former game reserve.
In 2011, Mills appeared on the TV show Loose Women. She spoke to the
hosts about working with a cheetah, one of her favorite parts of the role.
"I love animals, anyway, so I'm always terribly excited whenever we work with animals."
As the old saying goes, you can never have too much of a good thing. One would assume
that that adage goes double for twins, right? In 1986, Hayley Mills reprised her dual role as twins
in the The Parent Trap II — a contemporary spin on the old identical twin prankster theme, with some
plucky young triplets thrown into the mix. Parent Trap III, the final installation in the series,
aired in 1989. Neither offshoot was particularly memorable, and Mills herself stated that she had
initially found it strange to be approached with the idea of an adult-centered reprise.
However, the script eventually won her over,
and she agreed to do it. As she explained to Pat Sajack ,
"When I read the script and I saw that they'd really turned it into rather a clever story,
it then became a fascinating thing — to find out what's happened to these two girls over the years,
and to play twins again, which is great fun for an actress."
In 2008, on her 62nd birthday, Hayley Mills made a shocking discovery:
She had cancer in both breasts. She initially kept her diagnosis quiet, but opened up about
the experience at length in an interview with Good Housekeeping in February 2018, saying,
"It was an enormous shock. [...] Suddenly, I looked out at the world as if I'd never
seen it before. Everything felt clearer and sharper. And when you hear that diagnosis,
you realize, 'Now I'm going to find out what I'm actually made of.'"
Mills underwent surgery and chemotherapy, but she was so knocked out by the side effects
of the latter that she chose to supplement her infusions with organic and alternative
medicines and regimens, which included a drastically new system of diet and exercise.
She told the Daily Mirror,
"I was more frightened of the chemo than of the cancer."
Though Mills' deviation from strictly medically-recommended courses of treatment
was controversial, it was effective: After battling the disease for several years,
she was finally told she was officially in remission — a victory she credits to the
combination of different approaches she used, as well as to the love and support of her family.
Mills, who continues to get regular scans and check-ups — remains cancer-free.
In 2017, Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon made headlines in Feud, a TV series about the
famously contentious rivalry between legends Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Before that, however,
there was Legends!, James Kirkwood's hit 1986 play about two aging stars competing with each other in
a final-ish bid for stardom. It's 2015 Australian debut starred Hayley Mills and her sister, Juliet.
As Playbill described it, Legends! took audiences, quote, "into a world of gossip, rivalry,
reminiscence, longing and scandal" as two "famous but fading" stars compete for the spotlight.
All that, of course, was the polar opposite of the famously loving relationship between the
Mills sisters — probably all the more reason the siblings had great fun with the role.
"But we love working together, and this has just been another wonderful opportunity."
It had been a few years since she'd last appeared on our screens when Hayley Mills
joined the cast of BBC's Pitching In. As Deadline reported in 2018,
Mills was slated to headline the show alongside fellow legendary Brit Larry
Lamb of Gavin & Stacey fame. Pitching In is set in a Welsh caravan park, in which
"three generations of the same family" live and, naturally, struggle to get along with each other
Speaking to The Mirror in 2019, Mills admitted that she prefers being at home but her passion
for acting still burns brightly. Mills described Pitching In as the ideal compromise, saying,
"I was shooting for two weeks in a most beautiful part of the world."
The iconic actress has no plans to retire any time soon either, noting simply,
"For me, the need to work is constantly there."
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