Hayley Mills

Mills' son, Jason Lawson, a drama-school graduate now working at England's Suffolk Playhouse, will make his American acting debut opposite his mother. The pairing takes place at Cape Playhouse beginning Monday in Frederick Knott's "Wait Until Dark."

In the thriller, Mills plays a blind woman threatened by criminals, one of whom is played by Lawson. The criminals are looking for a doll her husband agreed to bring across the Canadian border, not knowing something is hidden inside.

Working with her son "is great. It feels so normal," Mills says during a telephone interview from a New York City rehearsal. "I can't believe we haven't done it" before.

Lawson was also in part responsible for Mills being in the U.S. at all. She sold the longtime family house in England three years ago to move to New York City because both her sons had fled the nest. Lawson was born from her relationship with actor Leigh Lawson, and his older brother, Crispian, a rock musician, is Mills' son from her May-December marriage to filmmaker Ray Boultin.

"I do (still) have a little house in London and I get over as often as I can. The boys are there and my parents are there. But I've been living her three years and love it. I always wanted to live in New York City and spend time here," Mills says. "The time came when my sons really had left home and the house seemed too big and I wasn't in it an awful lot. I was working and I always had to have someone living in it, watching the cats and watering my garden."

The decision to sell was a hard one. "It was a lovely old house and it was terribly difficult to leave that place. I look back with love and nostalgia and happy memories but I don't regret it. Life is constant change. Sometimes you can get a jump on life and make the change yourself."

Another reason for coming to America? "I fell in love with an American actor and he was here." But Mills is called back to rehearsal duties before she can talk more about her current romance.

	On Stage What: "Wait Until Dark" Written by: Frederick Knott Starring: Hayley Mills, William Atherton and Jason Lawson Directed by: John Rubinstein Presented by: Cape Playhouse Where: Route 6A, Dennis When: 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday and July 7-11 and 2 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday and July 9-10 Tickets: $25-$45 Box office: 508-385-3911 or 1-877-385-3911

Mills is best known and loved for her adolescent roles in Disney films. Her part in the British "Tiger Bay," which she famously won by accident when the director saw her while visiting her father, caught the attention of Walt Disney. He cast her in 1960's "Pollyanna," and that American debut as an optimistic girl who changes townspeople's lives, won her a special Academy Award for outstanding juvenile performance.

Mills, now 57, went on to star as twins in the box-office smash "The Parent Trap" and in the film adaptation of her mother Mary Hayley Bell's book "Whistle Down the Wind" in 1961; "In Search of the Castaways" in 1962; "Summer Magic" in 1963; "The Chalk Garden" and "The Moon-Spinners" in 1964; and "That Darn Cat" in 1965. In 1966, at 20, Mills played more grown-up roles in "The Trouble With Angels" and "The Family Way." She then fell in love with her director on the latter film, Boultin, who was 32 years her senior, and they lived in England.

In the '70s and '80s, Mills made a couple of dozen less well-known feature and TV films; did several American TV guest appearances on shows like "The Love Boat" and "Murder She Wrote"; and then reprised her twin roles as adults in three Disney TV sequels to "The Parent Trap."

For many years, though, theater has been Mills' main acting outlet, including a 1997-98 American stage debut touring as Anna in the musical "The King and I" and a less-than-successful off-Broadway debut in "Noel Coward's Suite in Two Keys" in 2000. This fall, following her Cape appearance, Mills is scheduled to tour the United Kingdom for three months in Charlotte Jones' comedy "humble boy."

"There is much less typecasting in the theater. There's a much greater variety, a much wider range of parts and a greater range of ages one can play in the theater," she says. "I've gotten really deeply involved in the theater and it's a wholly satisfying life when you're working - the life and the rehearsals and the whole how it maps out your day and your time. I spent so much of my early working life doing films and television and I'm not hankering to do it again."

"Wait Until Dark," which is directed by John Rubinstein (best known for Broadway and TV acting) and co-stars film actor William Atherton ("The Day of the Locust"), is Mills' debut at Cape Playhouse. She visited here, though, in 1998 to see sister Juliet Mills and her husband Maxwell Caulfield perform in "Dial M for Murder," another Knott thriller.

"I'm so looking forward to working there. It's a great little theater and has so much tradition and history - so many people have worked there," she says. As for the play choice: "There's nothing like a good thriller."

Sister Juliet (now on TV's daytime soap "Passions") has also played the role of Susy Hendrix and helped to prepare Mills for the part. She jokes about following in her sister's footsteps, but notes they don't work together that often.

In the late '70s, they both appeared with their father in a "Love Boat" episode and a few years ago, the sisters co-starred in Noel Coward's "Fallen Angels" for many months in a stage tour of England, Australia and New Zealand.

Co-starring in more plays "is something we always talk about," Mills says. "I'd love to find something else to do with her."

Meanwhile, Mills may be starting a new tradition by introducing Lawson, the third generation of the Mills acting acting family, to American audiences.

(Published: June 27, 2003)