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).
