Like old friends we've lost touch with, we somehow imagine that child film stars are frozen in time. While we weren't looking, pigtailed, pug-nosed Hayley Mills became a 51-year-old single mother of two grown sons.
Left behind are such sunny, spunky Disney movies as Pollyanna and The Parent Trap. Today, she's starring in the Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein stage musical The King and I, which arrives at the Kravis Center Tuesday evening.
In fact, Mills played the role of stern, stubborn schoolmarm Anna Leonowens in Australia in 1991, five years before this acclaimed revival won four Tony Awards on Broadway.
After receiving the offer to play Mrs. Anna - a role sung previously by Barbara Cook, Angela Lansbury, Julie Andrews and Gertrude Lawrence - Mills was awash in doubt. She warbled in those early movies - remember Let's Get Together from The Parent Trap? - and had appeared in London in a play with music, Trelawney of the Wells.
But she is candid about her limited singing abilities.
"It really is the least predictable part of my performance," she says in a telephone interview from Memphis, a tour stop earlier this month. "I spent months with a voice coach. My concerns were obviously about the singing - not being a singer."
Her reviews on that score have not always been kind. According to the Seattle Times, "it's almost painful to hear Mills strain for pitch and resonance in more demanding melodies." At press conferences during this tour, Mills self-effacingly calls herself "Rex Harrison ... in drag" and reminds the media that Lawrence, the musical's first Anna in 1951, was also more actress than singer.
"As my father (90-year-old Oscar winner John Mills) said to me when I said I was worried about this, he said, 'All you have to do is sell the song. Because in the end, that's what's important.'"
Indeed, Mills has gotten the last laugh. Passed over for the part of Anna on Broadway, where Donna Murphy won a Tony, the show's producers needed Mills' box office name to draw crowds on tour. After all, baby boomers who grew up on her movies are now the prime theater-going market.
Absence part of mystique
And her absence from America for the past few decades is part of her current mystique. What did ever happen to Hayley Mills? The actress who was magic at the box office, who received a special Oscar for Pollyanna in 1960, eventually was at a loss to make the transition from child star to adult film actress.
"After I'd been making movies pretty solidly for about 12 years, I faltered in what kind of movies I should be making and what kind of roles I should be looking for," Mills says candidly, with her regal British accent.
"And who the hell was I anyway?"
She was a young woman in her early 20s, who found her Disney-fied screen image no longer fit her. "I was growing up and the things I was doing in movies didn't really reflect what I felt about myself. And indeed, I wasn't sure what I felt about myself anyway. I had a lot of questions about what I was doing, how good it was and how I was doing it.
"It was a very instinctive thing for me to act, right from the beginning. But when you get older, and you get more thoughtful and analytical, you need to understand. In a way, you have to go back to the beginning, start again and understand what it was you did instinctively."
As to what made young Hayley such an international phenomenon, she hasn't a clue. "It was a mystery to me. God just put his finger on his head and said, 'Go for it.' And I was just happy and lucky to be in the right place at the right time and something wonderful landed in my lap."
She feels certain that much of her acting talent is hereditary.
"Oh, absolutely. It's in the genes," Mills insists. "I'm very much my father's daughter. From my earliest babyhood, I was taken backstage and dumped on the lap of the stage doorkeeper. I've slept in prop baskets. I've played with my toys up in the royal box in some dark theater while my father was onstage. I'm a theater child."
Ready for debut at 11
When it came time for her movie debut, with her father in 1959's Tiger Bay, 11-year-old Hayley was ready. "I was incredibly comfortable in front of a movie camera. It's because I started so very young."
These days, it is hard to avoid those movies. "They keep popping up on the small screen," Mills explains. "It's extraordinary how much air time they get. I have to admit, just between you and me and all your thousands of readers, that the good ones, I can see why they've survived, because they do have craft. But there are some that are dire and I think, 'My God, they're so slow.'"
No, she's not about to say which ones are which. "Let's just say there are good ones and less good ones," Mills comments obliquely.
The public reacted with shock to 1966's The Family Way, in which she played a newlywed with marital problems and in which she - gasp! - had a brief nude scene. The country was not ready to see its Hayley that way, the picture was banned in scattered locations and did little business elsewhere. Mills' film career faded away.
Since those days, she has worked on the British stage quite regularly, with time off to raise her family. Mills again had tongues wagging when she married Family Way director Roy Boulting, 32 years her senior. They had a son named Crispian, but the marriage ended in divorce after six years, prompted by her much-publicized affair with actor Leigh Lawson that produced a second son, Jason.
Her sons also have the Mills performing genes. Crispian, now 25, is a member of the rock band Kula Shaker, about which she enthuses, "They've had number one hit songs, their first album became number one in England. They've toured the States a number of times, their last tour they supported Aerosmith."
Jason, 21, attends Bretton Hall College in England, where he is studying drama. "The only one of the whole family that's ever been to university," says Mills with a throaty laugh. "They're all frightfully proud of him."
The theater - in addition to a preoccupation with Eastern religions - has been Mills' refuge and, she says, her salvation. Over the years in England, she has appeared in the classic plays of Chekhov and Ibsen. She played opposite sister Juliet (of Nanny and the Professor TV fame) in a tour of Noel Coward's Fallen Angels and, most recently, in the West End comedy Dead Guilty.
A return to movies?
Although her appearances in front of a camera have been rare since the mid-'70s, Mills feels like it's time to make movies again.
"Maybe it is," she muses. "Again, though, I have no idea what kind of parts I should be looking for. I don't fancy those faded old drunken mums in the background. But on the other hand, if it's a bloody good part, maybe I will."
Don't look for her in the imminent remake of The Parent Trap, although Mills was offered a role. "But it was not a very interesting part and I couldn't see myself playing the parent. It just seemed like an awful gimmick and I'm not really keen on gimmicks. It didn't appeal to me." Unmentioned is that Mills had already succumbed to the gimmick in a couple of TV movies in the 1980s: Parent Trap II and Parent Trap Hawaiian Honeymoon.
Still, as she leaves behind Mrs. Anna's corsets and hoop skirts next month, completing a year of touring, Mills sounds ready to find other projects in the United States.
"I love this country and it has been very good to me, giving me some of the most wonderful experiences of my career," she says. "I would love to work in theater in this country. I'm very happy here and I love the energy and the real sense of anything being possible that you do get in America."
It seems you can take the girl out of Pollyanna, but you can't take the Pollyanna out of the girl.
(The following was probably under a picture of Hayley from the 60s):
THE HAYLEY WE REMEMBER: 'I was a very uncomplicated child.'
Even as a grown-up Hayley Mills stars in The King and I, she can't escape her childhood fame. Walt Disney Records has just re-released Let's Get Together With Hayley Mills, with her warbling such songs as Johnny Jingo and Ding Ding Ding.
Mills says she doesn't know why she was such a young star.
"It was a mystery to me. God just put his finger on his head and said, 'Go for it.' I was a very uncomplicated child."
But she remains surprised at the enduring popularity of her movies. "They keep popping up on the small screen. It's extraordinary how much air time they get. I have to admit, just between you and me and all your thousands of readers, that the good ones, I can see why they've survived, because they do have craft. But there are some that are dire and . . . I see and go, 'My God!' and I switch it off immediately."