Hayley Mills (1946-) b. London, England.

Daughter of actor Sir John Mills and novelist-playwright Mary Hayley Bell. Mills made her feature film debut appearing with her father in director J. Lee Thompson‘s Tiger Bay (1959). The role brought her to the attention of Walt Disney, who signed Mills to a five-year contract. Mills won a special Academy Award for her performance in box-office success Pollyanna (1960). She went on to make several other movies for Disney, among them a dual role in the popular The Parent Trap (1961), The Truth about Spring (1962), The Moon-Spinners (1964), In Search of the Castaways (1964), and her final Disney contractual obligation That Darn Cat (1965).

Away from Disney she excelled in the Bryan Forbes directed drama Whistle Down the Wind (1962), playing a girl who shelters an escaped criminal believing him to be Jesus, and opposite her father once again in an adaptation of Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden (1963). Her first film after leaving the Disney fold was Sky West and Crooked (1965), directed by her father and written by her mother. The Boulting brothers handed Mills a role in The Family Way (1966), a gentle comedy about the marital troubles of a newly-wed couple which allowed her to break away from the Pollyanna stereotype with a well-publicized nude scene. She created further scandal when she married a man thirty-three years her senior, producer-director Roy Boulting in 1971. They separated in 1975 and were divorced in 1976. After Deadly Strangers (1974), Mills curtailed her film career for 14 years and devoted much of her time to television productions. She returned to feature films in the ensemble cast of Michael Winner’s Agatha Christie adaptation Appointment with Death (1988).