Hayley Mills Biography

Hayley Mills was one of the biggest child movie stars of the early 1960s: the Oscar-winning star of Pollyanna (1960) and a string of successful Disney movies including The Parent Trap (1961) and That Darn Cat (1965).

Hayley Mills is the younger sister of actress Juliet Mills and the daughter of Oscar-winning actor John Mills (1970’s Ryan’s Daughter) and writer Mary Hayley Bell (Whistle Down the Wind, made into the 1961 movie co-starring Hayley). In her early years she played sweet innocents in films like Pollyanna, for which she won a special juvenile Oscar. Mills shattered her naive image by appearing in the bawdy British comedy The Family Way (1967) and by marrying director Roy Boulting, more than thirty years her senior (they divorced in 1976).

In the 1970s her screen career nearly evaporated, in the ’80s she appeared in three television sequels to The Parent Trap and in a the short-lived series Good Morning, Miss Bliss (1987). She began focusing on a stage career in the 1990s, touring in The King and I. She joined the cast of the cable television series Wild at Heart (2007-12) and made occasional other TV and film appearances.