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The daughter of actor John Mills and novelist Mary Hayley Bell, Hayley Mills made her screen debut opposite her father in J. Lee Thompson's Tiger Bay (1959). She so excelled in a role originally written for a boy that she not only earned the British Academy Award for Most Promising Newcomer, but also caught the eye of Walt Disney's wife Lillian, who persuaded her husban... [+]

The daughter of actor John Mills and novelist Mary Hayley Bell, Hayley Mills made her screen debut opposite her father in J. Lee Thompson's Tiger Bay (1959). She so excelled in a role originally written for a boy that she not only earned the British Academy Award for Most Promising Newcomer, but also caught the eye of Walt Disney's wife Lillian, who persuaded her husband to sign her to a lucrative contract.

Mills had an immediate impact on Hollywood, receiving a special Academy Award for her ebullient performance in Pollyanna (1960), David Swift's adaptation of Eleanor H. Porter's enduring eulogy to gladness. Indeed, for a brief moment, Mills was the most famous child star on the planet. But, having enhanced her reputation for spirited charm as twins in David Swift's The Parent Trap (1961), she returned to Britain to confirm her potential as a sensitive juvenile lead in Bryan Forbes's Whistle Down the Wind (1961), an adaptation of her mother's novel, in which she was touchingly credible as the innocent convinced that fugitive killer Alan Bates is Jesus Christ.

Stanley Kubrick was dissuaded by Disney from casting Mills in his take on Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1962). Thus, she saw out her contract with the studio in Robert Stevenson's In Search of Castaways (1961) and That Darn Cat! (1965) and James Neilson's Summer Magic (1963) and The Moon-Spinners (1964).

Back in Britain, she impressed again in Ronald Neame's The Chalk Garden (1964), which is overdue a DVD release. She also teamed twice with her father, in his directorial debut, Sky West and Crooked, and in The Family Way (both 1966), a poignant domestic comedy that was scored by Paul McCartney and directed by Roy Boulting, who also guided Mills through the psycho-thriller, Twisted Nerve (1968), before marrying her in 1971.

Despite confident performances in Jonathan Miller's Kingsley Amis satire, Take a Girl Like You (1970), and Sidney Gilliat's Agatha Christie saga, Endless Night (1971), Mills's film fortunes (like those of her older sister Juliet) began to wane during the 1970s and she was seen increasingly on the stage and the small screen.

However, she remained a firm favourite at Disney and, following several assignments for the studio, was presented with the prestigious Disney Legend award in 1998. In 2007, she returned to Africa (where she had made The Flame Trees of Thika in the early 1980s) to join the cast of the hit ITV series, Wild at Heart. [-]