HAYLEY MILLS
Let's Get Together
Movie stardom kept Hayley Mills very busy beginning in the late 1950s. For years she shuttled back and forth between her native Great Britain and the United States, receiving positive reviews, kudos from film fans and even a few major awards. A drawback was that her education was given lower priority, which bothered her as a child and resulted in an effort to catch up, reading and studying frequently as she got older if only to satisfy her curiosity about the world and make her feel more well-rounded. Singing, another thing she was known for, was treated mainly to promote her movies. Though some success came in that area, she ceased pursuing a music career after a short time.
Hayley came into the world in 1946 with already-famous parents: successful actor John Mills and actress-author Mary Hayley Bell. Home was a 400-acre dairy farm in Sussex down south near the English Channel until, starting at age ten, she was enrolled in the Old Vicarage girls' school in Richmond (London area), where she took part in several plays before being sent to study in Elmhurst. When director J. Lee Thompson met the precocious 12-year-old, he hired her on the spot to star in his upcoming film Tiger Bay, despite originally planning to use a boy in the role. Co-stars were German-born heartthrob Horst Buchholz and Hayley's father in the role of a police investigator. A dramatic thriller shot in and around the waterfront area of Cardiff, Wales, concerning a child who witnesses a murder, it had many positive reviews and a strong run in cinemas, gaining young Mills a BAFTA award for Most Promising Newcomer. Then her career took a turn she never would have expected.
Walt Disney saw the movie and made arrangements for an impromptu audition that led to a five-year contract. Pollyanna, directed by Disney staffer David Swift and based on a best-selling 1913 novel by Eleanor H. Porter, made Hayley a star in the U.S. while simultaneously launching her recording career. In June 1960, just after the film's release, the EP Walt Disney's Pollyanna Songs arrived in record stores. Four youthful Mills performances were on the Disneyland Records disc: "The Glad Game," "I Yam, I Yiz, I Yar," "Jimmie Bean" and "America the Beautiful," the latter also issued as a single.
In March 1961 her performance in Pollyanna won her a Golden Globe award for Most Promising Newcomer - Female (in a truly international three-way tie with Hong Kong native Nancy Kwan and Brooklyn-born Ina Balin). A month later, she scored the big one: an Oscar for the Most Outstanding Juvenile Performance (making her the last of 12 such honorees over the years). It was presented by Shirley Temple (the first to receive the award in 1935) just one day before Hayley's 15th birthday; she was at her boarding school in England, so the other popular Disney Girl, Annette Funicello, accepted the award on her behalf, one-quarter of the way around the world in Santa Monica, California.
Next came a surprisingly high-profile vehicle for Miss Mills: The Parent Trap, also directed by Swift, became 1961's third biggest box office hit in American theaters. The story began with an unlikely setup: twin sisters Susan and Sharon, unaware of each other's existence, randomly meet in summer camp, figure out the trick their divorced parents played on them ("Auction off the furniture...divvy up the kids," as Annette once put it) and switch places for their respective return trips home. A plot to reunite mom (Maureen O'Hara) with dad (Brian Keith) proved irresistible to millions of moviegoers. Hayley played both roles convincingly (though with help from a third "twin," stand-in Susan Henning).
Disney's top songwriters, brothers Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman, composed two songs for the soundtrack: "The Parent Trap," sung during the opening credits by Annette and Tommy Sands (released as a single on Buena Vista Records), and Hayley's dual-vocal highlight. "Let's Get Together" ('...yeah, yeah, yeah!') gave the pair a chance to make their point in front of the soon-to-be-reunited parents. The one minute and 28 second studio version was credited to Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills (the scene in the film, performed by the 'gruesome twosome' with cinematic trickery and a bit of Ludwig van Beethoven's "Symphony No. 5," was vastly different and captivated millions). The Buena Vista single got airplay on stations across the U.S. and reached the top ten in October 1961. In addition to this unexpected bonus (to Hayley anyway, maybe not Walt), she received a Golden Globe nomination in the category Best Actress - Musical or Comedy. At about the same time she picked up a BAFTA nom for Best British Actress in J. Arthur Rank's production of Whistle Down the Wind, filmed after her Disney blockbuster (based on a 1959 novel by Hayley's mum, it was directed by Bryan Forbes, a previous BAFTA and Oscar nominee and one of the U.K.'s top filmmakers of the time).
With a hit song added to her resumé, she went into the studio with producer-arranger "Tutti" Camarata (who'd been a key player in Annette's success) and out came "Johnny Jingo," a ragtime-reminiscent tune by Dick Manning and Kay Twomey that spent five weeks in the top 30 in the spring of '62. Though it came with the territory of being a Disney star, Hayley wasn't thrilled with her own singing. Third single "Ching Ching and a Ding Ding Ding," a ditty penned by the Sherman Brothers, fared poorer than the previous two; an album with the obvious title Let's Get Together with Hayley Mills was released with her main six singles sides, a couple of the Pollyanna songs and a few other recordings, after which the musical focus shifted to her film soundtracks.
Big screen Disney outing number three teamed her with the famous French actor-singer Maurice Chevalier; In Search of the Castaways, an adventure film helmed by longtime Disney director Robert Stevenson and based on the nearly-100-year-old Jules Verne novel Captain Grant's Children, was set in various parts of the globe from Great Britain to South America to Australia. Songs (by the Shermans) include Mills' ballad "Castaway" and a more spirited duet with Chevalier, "Enjoy It." As before, Camarata produced the sessions. Debuting in theaters in November 1962, its huge seasonal success furthered Hayley Mills' status as a bona fide movie star. Summer Magic was a presentable (if less successful) July 1963 entry (her fourth of six per the contract); she co-starred with Oscar winner Burl Ives and hit singer Eddie Hodges, who was little more than a duet partner on throwaway old-timey Sherman songs like "Flitterin'" and "Beautiful Beulah." As a surprise to Hayley (who considered the film the weakest of anything she'd done), it somehow rated her another Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress - Musical or Comedy.
Back home in England in '64, she starred as a difficult teen in The Chalk Garden, then headed a lesser Disney effort, The Moon Spinners, an atmospheric mystery-romance filmed on location on the Greek island of Crete. This was followed in late '65 by her final Disney-contract film and one of its top moneymakers, the Stevenson-directed That Darn Cat, a comedic romp featuring bank robbers and the mischevious Siamese title pet. With her Disney days behind her (for the time being), she continued making movies on both continents, beginning with 1966's U.K. production Sky West and Crooked; known in the U.S. as "Gypsy Girl," it came with a title theme by Hayley, issued on a Mainstream Records 45 (her only non-Disney disc) that marked the end of her recording career...and singing in general!
Five theatrical movies comprised her screen career through the end of the decade, three of them in 1966. The Trouble With Angels, directed by award-winning actress Ida Lupino (one of the few female directors during that era), is a Columbia picture with a style similar to Disney's films. The Daydreamer, an animated Rankin/Videocraft production based on the writings of Hans Christian Andersen, found Hayley supplying the voice of the Little Mermaid, 23 years before the Disney film starring the same character. The Family Way, a British Lions film, put Hayley in a barely-revealing nude scene that caused quite a stir; as an added bonus, Paul McCartney composed the film's music score, including the theme song "Love in the Open Air." Pretty Polly, a British comedy, appeared in 1967. Around that time, Hayley married Ray Boulting, 33 years her senior. He directed her 1968 creepy-stalker thriller, Twisted Nerve.
The money Hayley earned during the Disney years was put into a trust fund until she turned 21. At that time, in 1967, she discovered her funds had been heavily taxed by the British government, leaving her with a very small percentage. She essentially had to start from...square two, let's say...in order to make a decent living, since her career had passed its peak. A 1969 West End stage production of Peter Pan was followed by many other plays, though not always in major venues. Movie work resumed at a slower pace and included a number of TV roles. Meanwhile her dad, John Mills, matched her Academy honor with an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in the 1970 romance epic Ryan's Daughter.
A divorce from Boulting led to a relationship and child (her second) with Leigh Lawson, an actor she'd worked with onstage. In 1986 she returned to Disney with the dual lead in Parent Trap II as Susan and Sharon grown-up. Then she starred in Good Morning, Miss Bliss on the Disney Channel (a precursor to the long-running Saved by the Bell sitcom), followed in 1989 by The Parent Trap III. During her time on Miss Bliss, the Oscar for Pollyanna (a special smaller-size statuette) went missing from her home in England and she was told by Academy representatives that the mold had been broken and it couldn't be duplicated. About 34 years passed until, much to her surprise, then-Academy President David Rubin replaced her award in 2022 with a full-size Oscar statue. The acting career of Hayley Mills - the second but far from the last famous Disney girl - has endured a lifetime, though with many ups and downs. One thing she avoided as much as possible was singing...her lowest priority.
