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Hayley Mills

She's still Pollyanna to her fans

By Kyle Lawson
The Arizona Republic
Jan. 4, 1998

Photo by Joan Marcus

"There's something indescribably romantic about wearing that dress," Hayley Mills says of one of her gowns in The King and I.

Fans line up outside the stage door, but Hayley Mills can tell. They're disappointed. Without her makeup from The King and I, she's a woman. Pretty youthful for 50, maybe, but still grown up.

"You can't stay 14 forever," she says, but she doesn't sound as if she expects anyone to believe it. Even her children went through a phase where they preferred the evidence of the videos. Cool, Mom, dig those great braids.

The actress knows that, daily, in some corner of the globe, her 14-year-old self tidies up everyone's lives in Pollyanna and proves that two adults don't stand a chance against twin teenagers in The Parent Trap. Her youth is preserved inside the planet's VCRs like a prehistoric mosquito entombed in amber.

She is quick to say she doesn't resent it, but in that world, she is forever on the verge of puberty, and that gets old even for a patient soul. When, as The King and I's governess, she sings Getting to Know You to the children, she's really offering the audience a chance to get to know her - not as she was, but as she is, a woman who managed to escape the deeper pitfalls of stardom but hit her fair share of potholes.

For some reason, those rough spots always come as a surprise to fans. That open, blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked English face to the contrary, Mills has been good at hiding her private fears. In the public's view, she remains the consummate professional, poised, beaming, at peace with herself and her world.

No one seeing her match wills with Vee Talmadge, her King and I co-star, will suspect she doubted she could do the role. Any more than audiences watching In Search of the Castaways or Summer Magic guessed that the actress was a mass of insecurities and victim of an eating disorder brought on by her conviction that, on screen, she looked like a "piglet."

If Mills, who has studied Eastern religions extensively, has a mantra today, it is, "You can't live your life safely." Even so, the self-doubts haven't been completely exorcised. When she was offered a chance to play Anna in an Australian tour of The King and I, she hesitated for six months before accepting.
'THE KING AND I'

WHAT: Rodgers and Hammerstein's Tony Award-winning musical, starring Hayley Mills and Vee Talmadge.

WHEN: Jan. 6- 11. Performance times vary.

WHERE: Gammage Auditorium, Mill Avenue and Apache Boulevard, Tempe.

TICKETS: $33-$47. 1-602-965-3434.

"I just don't know if I'm the one you want," she told the producers, who knew that she was and kept at her until she said yes.

"I'm glad that they did because the feedback from that tour led me to accept this American tour, and I'm having a wonderful time," she says.

As for her early film career, repeated screenings of The Moonspinners, the 1964 thriller where she blithely makes the transition from child actor to romantic lead, offer the viewer no clues to the personal turmoil she was enduring. She is every inch the teen queen of studio publicity, but away from the sound stages things were very different. She was so paranoid about her weight she was certain the crew wasn't putting film in the camera for her close-ups.

"Next stop, lunatic asylum," she said in a recent People interview. "What you want in front of the cameras is cheekbones and eyes that look like golf balls. It was a ridiculous thing. Constantly throwing up doesn't do much for your self-esteem."

Self-esteem would seem to have been the last thing lacking in the child who grew up on a sprawling dairy farm in Sussex, England. Unlike many show-business dynasties, the Mills clan is loving and close-knit. (Her parents are Academy Award-winning actor Sir John Mills (Ryan's Daughter) and novelist and playwright Mary Hayley Bell. Her older sister, Juliet, also is an actress and her younger brother, Jonathan, is a screenwriter and producer.)

She recalls it as a magic life filled with magic people: Noel Coward (her godfather), Vivien Leigh (who gave her the first of her beloved Pekingese dogs), Rex Harrison, David Niven, Katharine Hepburn . . . Mills' childhood dreams were typical of girls her age: She wanted to be a champion horse-show jumper and eventually marry Prince Charming and have a lot of kids.

That all changed when she was 12 and director J. Lee Thompson cast her as a girl who witnesses a murder in Tiger Bay. Lillian Disney saw the movie and nagged her husband, Walt, until he cast its youthful star in Pollyanna.

The Disney movie put Mills in a class with Shirley Temple and Margaret O'Brien when it came to screen moppets. She was so impressive that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded her a miniature Oscar. She still has it, only if you ask her where she keeps it in her London home, she sounds flustered.

"Oh, dear, you would want to know that, wouldn't you?" she says, laughing. "Somewhere around. I don't think about it a lot."

Whatever problems she faced off-camera, Mills' on-screen life remained charmed until 1966's The Family Way, her first truly adult film, and one that featured the obligatory '60s nude scene (a traumatic experience, given her paranoia about her weight). It wasn't popular and, after that, Mills' public image (which remained that of a squeaky-clean Pollyanna) seldom jibed with her choice of projects.

The one good thing to come from The Family Way was her association with its director, Roy Boulting, 32 years her senior. The couple married in 1971 and are the parents of Crispian, 24, leader of the British band Kula Shaker.

In 1975, Mills met actor Leigh Lawson when they appeared together on the London stage. Two years later, she ended her marriage to Boulting and moved in with Lawson, who is the father of her younger son, Jason, 20, now a student at England's Bretton Hall College.

Photo by Walt Disney Co.

In many fans' minds, Hayley Mills will always be Pollyanna, the title role she played in the 1960 Disney film. The teenager starred with Richard Egan (left), Nancy Olson and James Drury.

The relationship with Lawson ended in the early '80s, sending her on a personal quest that seems to have borne fruit.

"I have learned that the important thing is to believe in God and to live your life according to spiritual truths," she said in the People interview.

If Mills seems particularly footloose as she waltzes into Shall We Dance?, it may be because she's broken her most recent connection, a long association with Marcus Maclaine, a rock musician whose brother, actor Maxwell Caulfield, is her sister Juliet's husband.

If there is anything Mills loathes talking about, it is her personal relationships, so she's delighted, even if it is by this oblique method, to turn the conversation to The King and I.

"I love that scene," she says from her hotel room in Los Angeles, where The King and I is playing before moving to the Valley Jan. 5.

"There's something indescribably romantic about wearing that dress and sweeping through the waltz in the arms of the king."

Previous Annas have admitted to some concern, if not paranoia, about the gown. The skirt, to put it baldly, is almost as big as the set. It's never bothered Mills.

"It's like driving different-sized cars," she says. "You develop a sense of how wide and how long you are when you have to park it."

The role, on the other hand, has been "a big, big challenge, but I think I always would have been unhappy with myself if I had turned it down. I've done over 600 performances as Anna now and the play has become a bigger part of my life than the films, really."

She studied extensively with a vocal coach before taking on the part, which was originated on Broadway by Gertrude Lawrence (opposite Yul Brynner) in 1951 and re-created for the movies by Deborah Kerr (again opposite Brynner) in 1956.

Kerr, of course, didn't sing in the film. Her voice was dubbed by Marni Nixon. Mills is aware that it is Nixon against whom she will be compared by Gammage Auditorium audiences.

"I am not Marni and I am not Julie Andrews," she says. "I do it the best way I can within my limitations."

In recent years, Mills' career has centered on the stage.

"There are many reasons for that. When my children were growing up, I preferred being with them to running around the world making movies," she says.

"And as I became older, I wasn't offered the kind of work that interested me very much. Theater gave me the chance to stay closer to home and do the sort of things I would never get to do in Hollywood."

Typical is Dead Guilty, a West End thriller that enjoyed a lengthy run and cast her as a cold-hearted, manipulative woman who may, or may not, be the killer.

"That was great fun," she says, and for a moment the laughter makes her sound just like the braided-and-pinafored Pollyanna: "A lot of things got to come out."

Having her own children gave her a perspective on her Hollywood career that has stood her in good stead, she says.

"My boys were no different than most other young people. They seem to identify with those characters, particularly the twins in The Parent Trap. I do feel a certain responsibility, more about the kinds of things I choose to do.

"I am aware that people connect me with those old movies, and I am grateful. I don't wish those films had never happened, or that things would have been different. It's true that I sometimes bemoan the fact that people still want me to be 14 and, yes, there were moments when everything wasn't as perfect as it looked on screen, but it was a special time in my life, and I'm glad my work continues to give each succeeding generation pleasure."


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