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Hayley Mills
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Biography from Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia:
In the 1960s, Mills (daughter of actor John Mills and playwrightnovelist Mary Hayley Bell, and younger sister of actress Juliet Mills) was one of the world's top child stars. She proved herself a more than capable dramatic performer at the age of twelve in her debut film, Tiger Bay (1959), costarring with her father. For her performance as a terrorized girl who witnesses a murder and is abducted by the killer, Mills earned an acting prize at the Berlin Film Festival and a five-year contract with Walt Disney. Her first Disney production was Pollyanna (1960), a remake of the Eleanor H. Porter novel which Mary Pickford had filmed forty years earlier. Playing the evercheerful and optimistic title character, Mills earned a special Academy Award: a miniature statuette for giving "the most outstanding juvenile performance during 1960." Following Pollyanna Disney cast her in a series of highly popular familyoriented films: The Parent Trap (1961, cast as twins), In Search of the Castaways (1962), Summer Magic (1963), and That Darn Cat (1965). She also took a pair of challenging dramatic roles away from the Disney studio: Whistle Down the Wind (1961, based on a work by her mother), in the role of a fifteen-year-old who mistakes a murderer for Jesus Christ, and The Chalk Garden (1964), playing a sixteenyear-old who lives in a fantasy world and attempts to unearth the mystery of her new governess. She costarred as a mischievous nun-in-training in The Trouble With Angels (1966), and worked with her father once more in A Matter of Innocence (1967), aka Pretty Polly but the mystique of her innocence was irrevocably tarnished when she played a nude scene in The Family Way (1966), an otherwise innocuous comedy. She made headlines when she engaged in a highly publicized affair with that film's director, Roy Boulting, who was more than thirty years her senior; they wed in 1971, and later divorced. She made occasional, mostly forgettable films in the 1970s, including Take a Girl Like You (1970), Endless Night (1971), and The Kingfisher Caper (1975). Long out of the limelight, Mills returned to familiar turf to star in a trio of movies made for cable television's The Disney Channel: Parent Trap II (1986); Parent Trap III (1989); and Parent Trap Hawaiian Honeymoon (1989), as well as the more dramatic Back Home (1990). |  |
