The Hayley grail - interview with actress Hayley Mills - Interview

Interview, August, 1997 by Ingrid Sischy

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

INGRID SISCHY: 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?

HAYLEY MILLS: 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 obvious 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 shown 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 talking 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, nut 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 the 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 of 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 Wait 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?