#tiger bay

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Tiger Bay neighborhood in Cardiff, Wales

Photos of Tiger Bay, taken for Picture Post magazine by Bert Hardy in 1950.

Tiger Bay is Wales' oldest multi-ethnic community and sprang up in the 1800s when sailors from around the world came to work around the city's prosperous coal trade.

Photo: Bert Hardy

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Hayley Mills

Actresses Hayley Catherine Rose Vivien Mills (born April 18, 1946) is an English actress. The daughter of actor Sir John Mills and writer Ma

Happy 80th Birthday to Academy Award Winning, BAFTA Winning, Golden Globe Winning actress Hayley Mills! ^__^

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John Sangoe, a printer, in Tiger Bay, Cardiff (1943). Photographed by Reuben Saidman.

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Tiger Bay (1959)

My rating: 4/10

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How 'Parent Trap's' Hayley Mills survived kid stardom, bulimia and losing her Disney money

Hayley Mills, star of 'Pollyanna' and 'The Parent Trap,' is now 75 and has written a memoir about her life as a child actor under Walt Disney's watchful eye.

September 2, 2021

By Amy Kaufman

(Los Angeles Times) --  Hayley Mills always knew Walt Disney played a formative role in her life. After all, the studio founder was the one to cast the then-unknown Brit in 1960’s “Pollyanna,” offering her a seven-picture deal that would make her one of the most famous child stars in the world.

But it wasn’t until she found herself inside the Disney archives five years ago that Mills realized just how profoundly her identity had been shaped by him. In 2016, during a visit to the Burbank lot, the actor was invited to explore three boxes that contained hidden treasure — previously unseen correspondence between Mills, her parents and Walt himself.

The Disney she saw reflected in the notes did not exactly resemble the genial father figure who’d once toured her around his theme park and gifted her a gold charm bracelet. He did not want her in any “heavy dramas or sex involvements” as a teenager — the starring role in Stanley Kubrick’s “Lolita” was quickly shot down — and refused to let Mills’ parents “run the show.”

Back in London, Mills told her two sons about what she’d unearthed on the lot. For years, she’d mulled the idea of writing a memoir about her unique childhood. Now, her kids insisted she try again: “You really must do it, mum, before you forget your name.”

“I didn’t even know if I was capable of it,” Mills recalls. “But my eldest son, Crispian, said he would help me come up with a proper plan. And that made all the difference in the world, because I realized I wasn’t going to be alone.”

Even at 75, Mills is continuing to come to terms with how her girlhood reverberates — hence the title of her book, “Forever Young,” which comes out next Tuesday. In the memoir, she writes of “sleepwalking” through her early career, only now taking her “first real chance to understand and take ownership of the strange and remarkable things that happened to me.”

Mills focuses on her long struggle to shed the saccharine “Pollyanna” image, calling to mind recent Disney stars like Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato who rebelled against the squeaky-clean Mouse House. And yet despite a bout with bulimia and a battle to keep her childhood wages, Mills somehow remains unembittered — an outlook she credits, in part, to “Pollyanna.”

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Tiger Bay (1959)

Directed by J. Lee Thompson

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Hayley Mills: The “Every Girl” By Susan King

Hayley Mills wasn’t the typical child star. Unlike picture perfect Shirley Temple and Margaret O’Brien, the British actress was a bit of a scruff, a gangly, wild colt. Though cute, she certainly wasn’t adorable. But the daughter of Oscar-winning actor John Mills and author Mary Hayley Bell and baby sister of actress Juliet Mills definitely had the undefinable star quality. You couldn’t take your eyes off of her. And she had a naturalness and ease on screen. She was an “every girl.”

And that’s one of the reasons baby boomers fell madly in love with her in POLLYANNA (‘60), the first of six films she made for Walt Disney and for which she won the last Juvenile Oscar handed out by the Academy for her endearing turn as the eternally optimistic orphan who changes everyone’s lives. She just seemed like one of us. We all wanted to be her friend. And, as she got older, her young female fans wanted to be her; and boys wanted her to be their girlfriend. Even now, a smile lights across the faces of boomers whenever you mention her name.

In fact, when I recently posted on Facebook that I was watching her hit comedy THE TROUBLE WITH ANGELS (‘66) for the first time since it was released, people came out of the woodwork expressing their love for the movie and Mills, who is now 74.

Before she became POLLYANNA, Mills made her first credited film debut in J. Lee Thompson’s acclaimed black-and-white thriller TIGER BAY (‘59). She plays a tomboy named Gillie, who lives with her aunt in the poor and racially diverse Tiger Bay district of Cardiff. Gillie witnesses the murder of a woman in her apartment building by her young Polish sailor boyfriend (Horst Buchholz) in a moment of rage. Though she initially fears for her life when Buchholz tracks her down, these two lost souls end up developing a strong bond. Her father John Mills plays the police superintendent trying to find him and is thwarted every step of the way by Gillie, who lies constantly to keep the detective away until the young man leaves the country.

Again, she gives such a natural “coy”-free performance, you feel that Thompson had plucked a young ruffian off the streets of Tiger Bay to play Gillie. The first time I saw Mills on screen was in 1961 in one of her biggest hits for the Disney studio THE PARENT TRAP, a trippy comedy about twin sisters who meet at summer camp after their divorced parents (Maureen O’Hara and Brian Keith) had divvied them up as babies when the marriage ended. (One has to admit in this day and age, it’s more than a bit creepy and cruel that parents would do something like this.) The twins decide to play a trick on their parents, while plotting a way to get them back together, by switching places after summer camp.

Not only did the movie prove Mills could handle comedy with great aplomb, THE PARENT TRAP also turned Mills into a singing star. Not that she could really sing, but Richard and Robert Sherman penned Mills the catchy “Let’s Get Together” which became a hit tune.

Her next film for Disney IN SEARCH OF THE CASTAWAYS (‘62), an adventure based on a Jules Verne story, was the weakest of her Disney films. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for her follow-up movie SUMMER MAGIC (1963), a nostalgic comedy with the Sherman brothers once again supplying the songs. She was 17 when she made THE MOON-SPINNERS (‘64), a mystery thriller set in Crete based on a Mary Stewart best-seller. This time around, she is paired with the handsome British actor Peter McEnery as her love interest. Every girl in the audience also wanted McEnery as their love interest. Reviews were decidedly mixed, but Bosley Crowther in the New York Times stated the actress was growing up, noting “the ripening attractiveness” of Mills.

Mills ended her time with Disney with the blockbuster That Darn Cat! (‘65), an entertaining comedy about a mischievous Siamese cat named DC owned by Mills that ends up helping the FBI in solving a robbery and kidnapping. While she was under contract, Mills also made films in England including the lauded WHISTLE DOWN THE WIND (‘61) based on her mother’s 1959 novel of the same name. Directed by Bryan Forbes, the family film revolves around three farm children who find a bearded fugitive (Alan Bates) in their barn. Because he utters “Jesus Christ” when he is found, the three believe he really is Jesus. Mills received a BAFTA nomination for her charming performance.

Her first post-Disney film after GYPSY GIRL (’66) was the heavenly comedy THE TROUBLE WITH ANGELS (‘66) directed by Ida Lupino. I loved it when I first saw it and adored it when I revisited it recently. Mills and June Harding play the best of friends at a Catholic girls’ school and in between studying get into all sorts of trouble much to the chagrin of the Mother Superior (Rosalind Russell). Attending Catholic girls’ school for nine years, there’s little wonder TROUBLE WITH ANGELS is my favorite Mills film. TROUBLE WITH ANGELS also would be the last Mills film I would see in a movie theater.

THE FAMILY WAY (‘66), was her first grown-up role and marked her first nude scene. Not only that, Mills created a scandal when she had a romance with the film’s director Roy Boulting, who not only had children, but he was nearly 33 years older than Mills. The two would marry for six years in the 1970s and a have son, Crispian. Most of her films during that time certainly weren’t for her young fans and frankly weren’t very good.

Mills took a six-year hiatus and returned in the acclaimed 1981 miniseries The Flame Trees of Thika which aired on PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre. She’s been going strong ever since, even touring Australia in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I. Mills returned to the Disney fold doing several projects including the Disney Channel movie THE PARENT TRAP II (‘86), for which I got to interview her in person, and the Disney Channel film BACK HOME (‘89), for which I interviewed her for the Los Angeles Times.

I asked her—and yes, she was charming—in 1990 if it was different being a child star in Hollywood versus being one in England. “Quite different,” she noted. “As far as my own life was concerned going over to America was a most wonderful holiday. It was like going to Disneyland. America was a playground, and everything was larger than life. The sun was always shining, and the cars were always clean and shiny, and everyone said, ‘You’re welcome.’ It was rows and rows of comics, ice cream sundaes and endless channels on the TV. I was very well looked after. All I was expected to do was learn my lines and get on the set. Of course, when I came back to England I came back to reality and had to go to board school and behave myself!”