Hayley Mills

Hayley Mills, the former child star, seems to have forgiven New York. The 55 year old daughter of thespian Sir John was coldshouldered by its citizens when starring the off-broadway production of Noel Coward's Suite In Two Keys, which closed with indecent haste. Now the star of Disney'y Polyanna and The Parent Trap - who sold her Georgian cottage in West London last year after her children Crispian, 27, and Ace, 23, flew the nest - has bought a two-bedroom apartment at Riverside Drive on 104th Street for $800,000.

Hayley, who is dating Indian actor Firdous Bamji, 34, was so keen on the place she paid $5,000 above the asking price before other prospective buyer had a chance to see it.

Hayley Mills, the adorable child star who managed to grow up and have a more than respectable adult career, will make her New York theater debut -- off-Broadway -- come December. (She recently toured the country in ``The King and I.'')

Mills is set to star in ``Noel Coward in Two Keys,'' an evening of two one-act plays written by The Master himself: ``Shadows of the Evening'' and ``A Song at Twilight.'' Another icon of '60s films, Keir Dullea, is in negotiations to co-star with Hayley.

HAYLEY MILLS' BABY:
  "He's just like a big, warm peach"

As a result of having her first child last month, Hayley Mills says she is having "the laziest time of my life since I began work at 12." Ever since she set up house with her producer-director husband Roy Boulting, 59, the now 26-year-old Hayley has not only worked constantly as an actress, she also managed their Chelsea flat, doing all the cooking, housework, and chores.

"We wanted it that way because we loved the privacy of being alone," she explained in an exclusive interview just after coming out of hospital.

  "But now I haven't worked since we knew the baby was coming nearly nine months ago. And Roy insisted that we move into this furnished flat while our new house in Eaton Square is being redecorated.

  "It was a great agony to begin with, parting with the little flat in which we'd been so happy for so long. But Roy was right because I really felt rather sick during my first months of pregnancy. I wasn't ill, but I had very little energy and it was lovely to be looked after.

  "Now I have a cook and a nanny who is marvellous with Crispian and is teaching me to look after him properly. You know what I mean - how to bath him without drowning him. She will only stay with us for a month jut to give me reassurance and then I want to look after him all by myself.

  "I'd felt originally that I just wanted the three of us to be alone together, but I see the wisdom of the plan now. Can you imagine? All I have to do is look after myself and be with Crispian. It's too luxurious for words."

  But habit dies hard and Hayley says that, despite newspaper reports that she has given up her career, she is already thinking about work again.

  "You see, I know that if I don't soon, it will be terribly hard to wean myself from the baby and get back at all. And then the day would come when I'd be really dying to work again and couldn't.

  "Of course I'm looking some way off because we move to the house in April and I've got to furnish it and everything. Roy is already busy on his next picture which begins in April, so I must do the lot.

  "But just now I've never been happier in my life. It's terribly hard to explain except to say that I feel reborn. I'm a different person from the one who went into that hospital - and oddly enough I know already that what I've gained as a fulfilled person will reflect in my acting later.

  "I know I'm prejudiced but to me Crispian is the most beautiful creature in the world. He's just like a huge, great, big warm peach - and I feel as if I could eat him."

  Huge is accurate. When born Crispian John David was just under 9 lbs. Hayley said not one of the doctors predicted he would be so big "because he tucked himself up so neatly that he hardly showed."

  He took some time in arriving, but he managed to make his entrance just three days ahead of schedule.  Hayley took a psychoprophylactic course and is proud of the fact that she was conscious throughout her labour.

  "It's so wonderful to know that you push your own baby out into the world. That is part of the experience no mother should miss."

  She is equally proud of the fact that her husband Roy is "acting as if he's never had a baby before."

  Yet it was virtually because he took his own children by his previous marriage to see Hayley in "The Parent Trap", which she made for Disney when she was 14, that they are married now.

  When Roy was casting "The Family Way", he said to John Mills, Hayley's father, "She must be about the right age now for this part."

  After the film was made, Hayley decided to take a flat in Chelsea,having until then lived with her parents in Richmond.

  "But I never knew that Roy lived just down the road. When I found out I felt I just had to see him again - and right from that moment I knew that was that."

  They married in June, 1971, at Cap d'Ail in the South of France.

*Thanks to Caroline for the article and the picture!*

"When I was growing up, I never had that one ‘special’ teacher”, says Hayley Mills. “Because of my unusual childhood, I went to so many different schools that I never had a normal education.” After several decades of stardom, Hayley Mills will get the chance to play the teacher she never had--that one special educator who gave her all to make learning exciting and fun. In “Good Morning, Miss Bliss”, a new Disney Channel comedy series (premiering November 30 at 8:00 p.m., Eastern/Pacific time), Mills takes on the role of eighth grade teacher Carrie Bliss.

"Carrie is a very dedicated teacher,” Mills explains. “She has great faith and a huge enthusiasm for her work. She believes, and I agree with her, that teaching is one of the most important things you can do.”

Carrie Bliss’s enthusiasm is reflected in her students--a group of good-hearted, though somewhat rambunctious youths. There’s Zach, the 14 year old dreamboat. He’s a charmer and a con man--even in the classroom. His sidekick Mikey emulates Zach and often joins him in his pranks. Nicki is the strong-headed girl who sticks up for what she believes in, despite popular opinion. Her unlikely best friend, Lisa, the bubble-head beauty whose favorite pastime is shopping at the mall. and of course, no classroom would be complete without a misfit. Miss Bliss calls him by his proper name, Samuel; but the students call him Screech. For Screech, life is a never-ending battle to fit in with the ‘cool’ crowd.

Teaching kids today can be a formidable challenge. As Hayley Mills points out, “This is an age of video games, MTV and TV in general. Teachers have to compete with that, and it’s very difficult.”

Miss Bliss’s students are no exception to the nation-wide phenomenon of media-obsessed teenagers. As a result, she must employ rather unorthodox methods to get her point across. Mills comments on Carrie Bliss’s ingenuity, “She has a very unique way of teaching. Carrie tries to bring her subject alive in as any ways as she can.”

But Miss Bliss’s instructional antics often deviate from the traditional standards of Mr. Belding, the principal. For example, she might team up unlikely students for zany projects. In one instance she has them dress up in early American costume to teach them a history lesson. And chaos really breaks out when Miss Bliss teaches them about the stock exchange.

"In that episode the students all chip in a couple dollars and invest in some stock,” explains Mills. “They learn in a practical way, which is the best way, I think. Of course it all goes rather wrong and it’s very funny!” she adds, laughing.

The education Hayley Mills received is quite different from that of her students on “Good Morning, Miss Bliss.” Before beginning her film career, Mills attended a boarding school in her native England. “I think you tend to stay younger longer when you go to boarding school,” observes Mills.

When she came to Hollywood to make her first Disney film at age 14 (‘Pollyanna’ in 1960), Mill’s interests differed from those of other girls. “When I went to somebody’s house I wanted to swim and climb trees and they were going out on dates,” she recalls. “They were very much more mature and aware of themselves as little women.”

Hayley soon caught up and went on her first date at age 14. “Mum finally agreed to let me go out to Pacific Palisades with my first boyfriend - provided I had a chaperone. But she couldn’t come, so she sent the cook! That woman sat at the bottom of every ride just watching us!”

“Of course when Frank Sinatra, Jr. too me out, Mum came along.” And Michael Douglas was the envy of many a teenage American boy when he took Hayley out on his 16th birthday - and event she doesn’t even remember.

Her schooling at the Disney Studio was interspersed between takes and make-up checks. Mills fondly recalls, “They’d do a twenty-minute light check and send us off to the little red schoolhouse. I was there with all the other child actors. Annette Funicello was one of my classmates, but we never became good friends because we never worked together.”

Hayley’s work time was supervised strictly by welfare agents who were always on the set. “I remember on evening vividly during the filming of Pollyanna,” she recalls. “There was a scene with hundreds of extras. The directors wanted to do one extra shot, but it was past my working time. The welfare workers refused permission, and all those poor people had to come back the next day!”

Hayley’s enormous popularity after ‘Pollyanna’ landed her the lead roles in a series of Disney films, including ‘The Parent Trap,’ ‘The Moon-Spinners’, and ‘That Darn Cat!’

“I’m not really certain what my appeal was - I guess it was partially DNA!” laughs Mills. (Her father is Oscar-winning actor John Mills, her sister is actress Juliet Mills). “I was very lucky to start at the time that I did because I began when acting was the most natural thing in the world to do. It was an extension of the games that I played in my imaginary life that we all have when we are children. It didn’t seem difficult at all.”

Her five-year association with Disney Studios garnered Hayley Mills a special Oscar, international acclaim - and a squeaky-clean image that was hard to break when she later auditioned for more mature roles. Though she once felt ambivalent toward that identity, Mills feels it has been a benefit in the long run.

“After a good many years I’m rather glad that that image stayed,” she comments. “It was a very positive identity - although I once fought against it because there were roles I wanted to play that were considered unsuitable - Lolita, for example.”

“I’m very proud of my image now and I wouldn’t change any of it. One of the things that makes me really happy is that if one of my old movies comes on while my boys are watching television, I don’t have to rush to turn it off!”

Being a mother has certainly helped Mills with her role as Carrie Bliss. “Working with children is wonderful because I’m in touch with my childhood again,” she smiles, then adds, “but it comes mostly from instinct.” Peter Engel, the series’ executive producer observes, “When you come right down to it, it’s instinct that makes a great athlete, director, or actor. Instinct is what makes the different between great and very good. Hayley has that instinct.”

“Miss Bliss is the kind of teacher who feels that education doesn’t end at 3:00 p.m., it starts at 3:00 p.m.,” Engel continues. “It’s a 24 hour job.” And as Mills points out, Carrie Bliss is involved in every facet of her students’ lives. “Teaching is her life,” she says, “and there are thousands of teachers out there like her.”

Miss Bliss has the magical ability to treat each student as an individual. And the students on “Good Morning, Miss Bliss” are a diverse and interesting group. They’re more than just stereo-typical teens. For example, they’ve known each since the first grade. They played in Little League together. They laugh and they cry. They strive to fit in, to stand out, and sometimes, just to get by. Carrie Bliss doesn’t dismiss their problems as simple adolescent angst. She touches them. And they touch her.

“Carrie Bliss loves her job as a teacher and that’s how I feel about being an actress,” says Mills. She adds thoughtfully, “There’s a wonderful line that Christa McAuliffe (the teacher killed in the Challenger accident) used to say. ‘I touch the future; I teach.’ It’s a rather inspiring thought. That’s what I base Carrie Bliss on.”

In 1960, at 14, she won the hearts of American moviegoers as Pollyanna. This year, English-born Hayley Mills makes her U.S. stage debut as the prim governess Mrs. Anna in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘The King and I,’ presented by Dodger Touring, a New York-based production company.

“I hope this doesn’t sound Pollyanna-ish,” says the actress in her plummy British accent, “but I think it’s going to be wonderful to be a gypsy for a year.”

Mills made her large-screen debut with her father, Academy Award-winning actor Sir John Mills, in the 1959 British film ‘Tiger Bay.’ After seeing the movie, Walt Disney immediately signed young Hayley to play the lead role in ‘Pollyanna.’

“I went to Walt’s suite at the Dorchester Hotel, in London, along with my parents, my younger brother, and our Pekingese dog, Suki,” Mills recalls. “Walt laughed a lot as he spoke. He kept laughing in a rather shy way, which I found very endearing. I think that’s what made me warm to him. That and the fact that he liked childish things. I remember he and I were crawling around the floor after Suki.”

Following ‘Pollyanna’, she went on to make a string of Disney films, including the 1961 box-office hit ‘The Parent Trap’; ‘In Search of the Castaways’ (1962); ‘The Moon-Spinners’ (1964); and ‘That Darn Cat!’ (1965). In recent years she’s kept in touch with her Disney roots, appearing in such television productions as ‘Parent Trap II’ (1986) and III (1989), and the Disney Channel’s ‘Back Home’ (1990).

“Walt gave me my career, really,” says Mills. “He set me on a path that I was to travel for quite a long time. It’s been a wonderful gift.”

Hayley Mills was once the most popular child star in the world. Her tomboy persona was a touchstone for millions. She was believable. She had a mind, personality, zip--something that audiences even today immediately zap into when they see those movies she did. The kid had true resonance. That’s why there’s a search on to find a ‘90s Hayley for a remake of her most undercurrenty film, The Parent Trap, in which she played a double. The search won’t be so easy--Mills is a one of a kind. Here we talk to her about her life, her work now, and what it was like to be an actor under Walt Disney’s control.

IS: When I told people that I was going to interview you, there was a real tingle of excitement. Are you aware of how much you have meant to millions, in fact?

HM: It’s a very, very nice feeling--there’s a better word than nice, but nice it is for the time being.

IS: When you were a child star, were you conscious of how much your screen personas meant to other kids who were seeing your movies?

HM: I was aware of it, because the fan mail, of course, was from my contemporaries. But it still surprises and delights me that people remember me now and come to see me at the stage door when I’m doing a play, or write to me, and associate me with their own lives when they were growing up. It’s obvous that all those films are very much a part of many people’s childhood and teen years. Of course it’s helped now by the fact that those films are available on video and many are show quite regularly on the Disney Channel. They’re still alive and kicking.

IS: Very much so. I think there’s a consciousness today that can allow people to understand what it is about you in those films that triggers something. If I take my own experience--whether we’re taling about The Parent Trap (1961) or The Chalk Garden (1964) or The Trouble With Angels (1966)--you were definitely the first person in the movies who I could identify with, not that I would have used that word at the time. It had to do not only with the parts you played, but with you as an actress. There was great spirit in those parts. The mischievousness that you got to show was of course incredibly thrilling. There you were with blue jeans on, and I don’t know if you were climbing trees, but it felt like you were climbing trees in those movies. You had real character.

HM: Walt Disney said to me once that what interested him most about making a movie was to show the best in human spirit. Even though they perhaps tended to show things in a bit too rosy a light, it was a mistake, I think, to dismiss those films I did as just family movies and say, “Well, there was nothing in them that was going to upset anybody.”

IS: Do you think the fact that you grew up with a mother who was a writer (Mary Hayley Bell), as well as a father who was an actor (Sir John Mills), was important to your own desire to be an artist?

HM: Well, I was twelve when I did Tiger Bay (1959), and I didn’t really think very seriously about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I’d been a bit of a wild child in the country in England, on a farm with cattle and pigs and chickens--and, you know, gum boots. Then I was a boarder at a ballet school, which my sister, Juliet, was already going to; I suppose they felt it would help to curb my propensity to knock things over all the time. (laughs) But I didn’t want to do anything, really, other than have a lot of horses and one day a lot of children! Then Tiger Bay came along and things started to take shape.

IS: How did Tiger Bay come about?

HM: J. Lee Thompson, who was going to direct the movie with Horst Buchholz, a very good-looking German film star, came down to our farm in the Sussex countryside to talk to my father about him playing the detective inspector. As you know, the film’s about the relationship between a Polish sailor (Buchholz) who kills his girlfriend and abducts the child who witnesses the murder through a letterbox. When J. Lee Thompson saw me on the farm, he decided the child didn’t have to be a boy, as they’d thought; perhaps it could be a girl. I did a screen test, and that was it. I’ve had a life of things happening to me like that, and it’s taught me to trust that they happen to you because they do, and that we’re really not in control of the whole thing ourselves. I’ve never felt fully in control of my life, and indeed, when I try to take control if it I usually make a hash of it. Things have a life of their own.

IS: I’m wondering how much you realized about the power of your films in your years as a very young star. For example, did you know that The Parent Trap was, at the time it came out, the biggest box-office hit Disney had ever had?

HM: I honestly didn’t know that. After I did Pollyanna (1960) for Walt Disney, I signed a contract and made five films--that’s six in all--in five years for him. But because I don’t get any residuals, I am not privy to the accounts. (laughs)

IS: You were obviously a hot property, as they say, for the studio, and they presumably wanted you to keep personifying the qualities that you personified so well in their movies. From your own observations, do you think actors have more freedom these days?

HM: I think there’s not such a danger of being typecast now. I always wanted to play all sorts of different things, and that’s why I’ve done theater since then, where in one year I’ve been able to play the embittered middle-aged widow who murders her husband’s mistress, as well as a quintessential prewar English wife in Brief Encounter, and now here I am touring America as Anna in The King and I.

IS: The tour has just reached Seattle, right?

HM: Yes, and I’m loving it.

IS: What interested you about doing it?

HM: Oh, it’s such a beautiful, ravishing show--the music, the story, the characters, everything. It addresses that constant, ongoing part of life--that until an old way has died, a new life can’t spring forth. We all want change to happen overnight when we see that things are wrong in the world, but only very occasionally does a Berlin Wall come down overnight. Remarkable changes do take place, but to change the mentality of a generation, that mentality has got to die. That’s what happens when the old ways embodied in the king die, and Anna is the strange catalyst of that.
For this part, I worked very hard on my voice. I’ve actually been taking singing lessons for about twenty years. I’d been asked to do Camelot many years ago in London, and I bottled out because I’d have had to sing. I always regretted that, so when I was asked to do The King and I in Australia in 1991 I decided to take a chance, and although I have to admit I took months to make my mind up. I ended up doing an eight-and-a-half-month run in it. It coincided with a new impulse in me to take on challenges. There’s nothing particularly admirable or exciting just doing what you know you can do.

IS: But your singing goes back much further than twenty years, doesn’t it?

HM: (laughs) I’ve sung in all sorts of things in all sorts of ways. I sang the Twenty-third Psalm in Tiger Bay, the first film I did. And I sang a song called “Let’s Get Together” in The Parent Trap, which surprised everybody by getting into the hit parade and has haunted me for nearly forty years. (laughs) And I did a couple of musical films and a stage musical. I am definitely never going to sound like Maria Callas, but I enjoy singing and people keep asking me to do things in which I have to do it, so I think, All right--why not?

IS: Your older son’s the other member of the family who currently sings for a living, right?

HM: Yes, Crispian. My other son, Jason, is a university student.

IS: We did a piece on Crispian’s band, Kula Shaker, earlier this year in Interview.

HM: Oh, I’d love to see it! They’re doing pretty well. I’m very proud of both my sons.

IS: I’d like to back up for a bit to when you were hitting adulthood. When you finished that contract with Disney, were you raring to go?

HM: Well, I had a lot of work to do on myself when I finished with that contract. I was eighteen when I came out of it, and I had a big “Now what?” feeling. It was as much a question about where to go and what to do with myself as a young woman as it was about which direction I ought to be taking professionally. I couldn’t really answer either of those questions. Allowing the benevolent universe to send to me whatever it is I was supposed to do was one thing, but I think I probably invested a bit too much power in other people and didn’t know what I really wanted. I was just looking around, and I was a bit lost for a while.

IS: How could you not have been? It seems to me that even though it was exciting to work at Disney, the system was all about investing power in the studio and the man who ran it. Is that true?

HM: Sure. I didn’t have any great say about what I did next, whereas they did. They would not let me do films they felt were unsuitable.

IS: Like Lolita (1962)?

HM: Yes. But my feeling is that it’s all been an incredible journey, and if I’d got everything sorted out a long time ago, I wouldn’t be enjoying the experience of learning so much now. Professionally, I think I’ve enjoyed the last ten years more than, say, the fifteen years before that.

IS: Did you ever feel that you were part of the Hollywood system?

HM: No, because I wasn’t. I never lived permanently in Los Angeles, and not all the Disney movies were made in America. The Moon-Spinners (1964) was made on location in Greece and Crete, with studio stuff at Pinewood (England), and In Search of the Castaways (1962) was made in England. Then I fell in love with an Englishman (film-maker Roy Boulting, who directed Mills in The Family Way, 1966) and married. Then it was all to do with where one’s life was--and ours was in England.

IS: When you fell in love with this Englishman, you were twenty and he was thirty-two years older than you. From what I’ve read and what I remember, it was a big “shocker.” Did it freak you out when the press reacted that way?

HM: Not really. I sort of expected it. You can’t not do what your heart tells you to because of what the press is going to say and because of people are going to be upset. I have an amazing son (Crispian) from that marriage and an amazing son (Jason) from my relationship with Leigh Lawson.

IS: Since it started, have you consistently been passionate about working as an actor?

HM: I was incredibly lucky to stumble into a profession that has sustained me for my whole adult life. I was lucky to find it so young, because I don’t think there’s anything else I could have done.
Joan Plowright once said that you don’t need to go to a psychiatrist ifyou’re an actor, ecause you can express so many of your problems and your emotions through your work And you really can. The theater in paticular is a great discipline. You can’t stop in the middle of a play and burst into tears because the person you love has walked out on you and your life is collapsing around you. or because you’ve had bad notices. You have to get on with it. You have to draw from your deep inner resources, those strengths that keep us all alive. In the movies you’re spoiled, because if you don’t do something very well, it’s “Cut! Do it again.” But the theater builds terrific emotional and spiritual stamina. It’s a great teacher.

A former child star is now gracing the stage at the Dallas Summer Musical. Hayley Mills stars in “The King & I.” Channel 8’s Jamie Tobias talked to her about going from Pollyanna to Anna.

clip from “Pollyanna”:
“My father said don’t let’s be gloomy. Let’s try to find something to be glad about. So we made a game of it, the glad game.”

As Pollyanna, Hayley Mills brought sunshine to a small town and lit up the big screen.

JT: True confessions. When I was a little girl I wanted to be you, I wanted to sound like you, I wanted to look like you. Were you aware that you were such a role model?

HM: Uh, no I don’t think so. No, not really. Um, for a long time my life was very sort of untouched by the movies I was making. It’s probably just as well. (laughs) But it is very wonderful for me, now, all these years later. Something that one has been a part of, or be it absolutely, uh, unaware at the time, did have a positive influence, uh, on other people’s lives. That is a wonderful thing. And that is really almost the best thing about my whole life.

Now Mills is spreading a whole new kind of positive energy as Anna in the national tour of “The King and I.” Her first foree (sp?!) into American theatre, Mills brings more grace and presence to the stage than a dozen actors put together.

HM: It’s a very interesting part to play. It’s a very interesting character, partly because she was a real person, and because of everything that she takes with her on stage: Victorian England, Victorian womanhood, Victorian morals, Victorian sexuality...

JT: Victorian hoopskirts.

HM: Victorian hoopskirts, hats, corsets and all those things, yes.

JT: So much of the play between you and the king is his learning to respect you as a woman. You have two sons of your own, don’t you?

HM: I have.

JT: What have you taught them about respecting women?

HM: I suspect what I’ve taught them, without knowing I’ve taught them, is more useful than what I have tried to teach them. Um, but I hope I’ve taught them to respect women for being women, and for their difference, and for what they have to offer.

From little girl to grown up woman, Mills continues to offer a positive message, and audiences are glad of it.

Jamie Tobias, Channel 8 News.

If I find anymore interviews, I will post them here as soon as I can! If you know of any interviews, please let me know about it! Thanks.