Hayley Mills in King and I at Kravis

By JAN SJOSTROM
Daily News Arts Editor

It may come as a jolt to some that Hayley Mills, the honey-haired dynamo who was Disney's biggest box-office attraction in the 1960s, has grown up.

Believe it. Now 51, Mills is philosophical and meticulously polite - not at all like the mischievous, high-spirited characters she portrayed in films such as Pollyanna, The Parent Trap and In Search of the Castaways.

She chooses her words carefully and although she does not shirk questions about her past, she'd rather talk about theater - the steadying force of her life. Mills' latest role is Anna in the national tour of The King and I. The newest revival of the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein musical arrives at the Kravis Center Tuesday and remains through Sunday, March 22.

"This is a wonderful part," Mills said from a tour stop in Memphis. "No doubt it's the toughest part I've ever done in my life."

It takes stamina to play the English governess who teaches the King of Siam and his court Western ways.

Mills must bob around the stage in heavy crinolines. More often than not, she's singing. "Once you're on stage you don't stop for three hours and it's got to look effortless," Mills said.

The show is Mills' stage debut in the United States. She's had considerable experience acting in her native Great Britain and on tour in Australia and New Zealand.

Mills was the first to play Anna when the show was resurrected in Australia in 1991. When the musical transferred to New York, Mills did not come along. Her singing voice, never her strong suit, was not big enough for Broadway.

Mills was not distressed about leaving the show. "I never expected to do it in New York," she said. "As far as I was concerned I did it in Australia and that was it. After doing it 10 months in Australia, that was enough for anybody."

When the time came to do the American tour, Mills' capital as a household name outweighed her vocal limitations.

Although she's no diva, she doesn't have to be to play Anna, Mills said. Gertrude Lawrence, the actress for whom Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote The King and I, was no songbird either, Mills noted. "As an actress, I sell the song and sing to the best of my abilities," Mills said.

Mills can thank good genes for her abilities. She is the daughter of actor Sir John Mills and novelist Mary Hayley Bell, whose works include Whistle Down the Wind. Her sister Juliet Mills is also an actress.

Hayley Mills was a tomboyish 11-year-old when director J. Lee Thompson came to her family's farm in Sussex to talk with John Mills about appearing in the mystery thriller Tiger Bay. There was a role in the film for a young boy. After meeting Hayley, Thompson substituted a girl for the boy and signed both father and daughter.

Walt Disney saw the film and liked the girl's grit. She was just what he needed to counteract the sugary sweetness of Pollyanna's script. Mills won a special Oscar for the movie.

She went on to make five more films for Disney. One of them, The Parent Trap, outpaced all Disney's previous box-office records. At the time, Mills was getting as many as 10,000 fan letters a day.

Mills continued to live in Britain between films. Her life was anything but that of a average adolescent.

It wasn't easy for a teen-aged movie star to make friends. "I suppose it made me doubt that people really knew who I was because they had a preconceived idea of me," Mills said.

In 1967, Mills made the film The Family Way. The movie included a shot of Mills displaying her backside while in the bathtub.

"I was a skinny thing who didn't look more than 12," she said. "It's laughable compared to what you see now. My God, what you see!"

The nude scene and her marriage to the movie's director Roy Boulting, who was 32 years her senior, ended her association with Disney.

Mills said her marriage was a love match, not a declaration of independence. "You can get all Freudian about why I fell in love with him, but the fact was, I did."

The marriage produced a son, Crispian, and dissolved in divorce after seven years. Mills then lived with actor Leigh Lawson, with whom she had her second son, Jason.

The years passed. Mills cast about for a direction in her career. She found it in theater. She's performed in the thriller Dead Guilty on London's West End, with her sister on tour in Noel Coward's Fallen Angels, and in many other shows.

Theater, she said, "demands the best of you all the time, whatever is going on in your life. You can't sit back and feel complacent."

With a schedule like Mills', it would be difficult to feel complacent. She's been on the road with The King and I for a year.

In another month, she will hang up her crinolines. After that, "I will take a very long sedentary holiday somewhere where it's too hot to move," she said.

Tickets to The King and I are available at the Royal Poinciana Playhouse at the Kravis box office at 832-7469 or through TicketMaster at 966-3309.

Originally published in the Palm Beach Daily News on Sunday, March 15, 1998