ACTRESS Hayley Mills talks about her father Sir John as she releases a DVD of his best films and discusses growing from a precocious teen in The Parent Trap to an older and wiser woman of 61.
By Kate Hodal
Once upon a time, long before limelighted father-daughter duos consisted of petulant teens bedecked in mini-skirts and their sleepless dads watching worriedly from the sidelines, Sir John Mills made sure that when his daughter wasn't on set, she was in boarding school.
There were no heroin overdoses, no refusals to go to rehab, no whizzing at breakneck speed through palm-tree lined lanes to escape the paparazzi.
And now, three years after the legendary screen veteran died of a chest infection aged 97, his daughter, Hayley Mills, child star of The Parent Trap, is paying tribute to her dad by releasing a DVD of eight of his best-loved films, including Waterloo Road, Great Expectations and The History Of Mr Polly.
"It's great the DVD's coming out now," says Hayley in her trademark breathless voice. "This is my father's centenary and he always wanted to reach 100. He was determined to do it. But he changed his mind when he got ill and he actually went at 97, with great dignity and courage as an example to us all."
Sir John - who once said he knew he wanted to be a performer from the age of six - hit London stages in 1929 after being scouted by Noel Coward. In a career that spanned 75 years and over 100 films, a CBE and knighthood to boot, he was always remembered as the quintessential English hero in war films such as In Which We Serve and We Dive At Dawn.
Hayley speaks with a reverence for her father usually shown only by young boys discussing football players. But the relationship with him was familial as well as professional and served as a bond to tie them inextricably closer.
"I worked with him a lot," says the 61-year-old actress, who was discovered aged 12 by director J Lee Thompson.
"I did four movies with him - Tiger Bay, The Family Way, The Truth About Spring and The Chalk Garden - and one movie where he directed me, Sky West And Crooked. It was so different, because we had a good acting relationship and a director has a tremendous amount of responsibility and it was a story written by my mother (writer Mary Hayley Bell), so there was a lot hanging on it. But having been an actor himself, he knew how to talk to actors and was very, very sensitive as a director."
Despite the fact that Hayley was fast becoming a Hollywood favourite at the time, winning recognition and accolades across the industry, Sir John had other ideas for his daughter.
"I didn't stay in Hollywood," explains Hayley, where, after Tiger Bay, she filmed Walt Disney's Pollyanna, a film that would win her a child Oscar at the tender age of 14. "I came back to England to my boarding school. I was taken out of school to make a film and then put straight back into my little cage.
"I don't mean that really but I led a very disciplined life in those days at boarding school I washed my hair once a week, I couldn't leave the school grounds, I controlled myself and respected authority."
Such behaviour is practically unheard of in today's typical celebrity profile. And what better to illustrate the changing times, than to point out the fact that troubled teen actress Lindsey Lohan got her big break as a child in a remake of The Parent Trap nearly 40 years after Hayley's original.
"When I was working in Hollywood, there were, of course, wild parties and lots of permissive behaviour," Hayley reveals. "It's just that it didn't get in the press so much. Kids have a lot more freedom now, from the very beginning. And the focus and pressure today on young singers, celebrities and actors makes it very much harder for them to grow up and make their mistakes and lead their lives.
"Privacy is a very valuable thing and your reputation is as well. It's only when it's taken away from you that you realise how great that loss is to you."
While she won't go into details about how the media has affected her own personal life, she does allude to the problems of falling in and out of love, "the things that happen in everyone's life", and the "devastating effect that ripples through into relationships with children and families" when those things are made public.
Hayley's first marriage at age 20 to the 53-year-old Roy Boulting, with whom she had son Crispian Mills, singer of rock group Kula Shaker, certainly raised some eyebrows and their six-year romance and resulting divorce stands in stark contrast to the constancy of her parents' marriage.
"My mum and dad found their soul mates in each other," she says of their 64-year marriage. "They were the greatest of friends and they had, each of them, such a wonderful sense of humour that arguments and differences never really mattered very long. My father always used to say that you must never go to sleep on a row, always say you're sorry even if you think you're in the right.
"But I don't think we all have the same destinies, and it wasn't in my stars to find one person and for that person to go with me throughout my life. It's extraordinarily lucky if you can find that one person to go through all those experiences and stages in life with, and that's what they found."
While Hayley's harder to find on the silver screen these days, intimate footage of home life and some of Sir John's behind-the-scenes takes are included with the DVD box set.
The mother of two can also be seen in ITV's Wild At Heart, a series about a Bristol-based vet who moves to South Africa to take care of game animals.
And until she finds a great film role, she's happy working on a series she calls "wonderful and very positive".
"As you get older," she explains, "the parts written for women become less and less. Our notion of beauty is so limited - we like flawless skin and youth but what about the beauty of white hair and lines and experience?
"I think it's harder physically - we're not so keen to be photographed at eight in the morning on the floor with a camera up your nose - and I don't think that HD television helps!
"But eventually," she sighs, "you have to accept that you can't buck nature: you have to go with the flow."
Now that's an attitude the very British Sir John would doubtless be proud of.
The John Mills Centenary Collection I, released by ITV DVD, is available now, priced £49.99.
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