Hayley Mills

Private Passions

In a warm and frank interview, Hayley Mills talks to Michael Berkeley about the joys and difficulties of growing up in Hollywood as a child star and about the music that reminds her of her family.

Hayley Mills was described by Walt Disney as ‘the greatest movie find in 25 years’. After winning a Bafta at the age of just 12 in the British crime thriller Tiger Bay alongside her father, John Mills, she was signed up by Disney for a six-movie deal which included The Parent Trap, In Search of the Castaways and Pollyanna - for which she won an Oscar in 1961.

In a career spanning more than six decades, Hayley Mills has gone on to work all over the world in films, television and on stage, and she has just published a memoir of her early life called Forever Young.

She tells Michael why she was unable to collect her Oscar, and about the agonies her parents suffered trying to decide whether or not she should sign with Disney and the pressures of juggling a double life between Hollywood and a chilly English boarding school.

And she talks frankly about suffering from bulimia as a teenager, the problem of her mother’s drinking, and how her life changed forever at the age of 21, when she had to hand over almost all her childhood earnings to the Inland Revenue.

A proud mother of two sons and grandmother of five, Hayley Mills chooses music by Tchaikovsky, by Mendelssohn and by Bach, which reminds her of her sister, the actor Juliet Mills; of her mother, the screenwriter Mary Hayley Bell; and of her partner, the actor Firdous Bamji.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3