CHILD STAR SURVIVES FAME
Hayley Mills dishes on Disney, Elvis, fan mail & more
LONG before Lindsay Lohan burst onto the screen, Disney’s biggest child star had moviegoers seeing double.
The film was 1961’s “The Parent Trap,” in which 15year-old Hayley Mills played twin daughters determined to stop reunite their divorced parents. Nearly 60 years later, the British actress is still in touch with her old twin stand-in, Susan Henning.
“She was the same age as me and the same height, and she was wonderful!” Mills tells The Post. “We’d play the scene, they’d film half, and then we’d switch clothes and wigs and do it the other way.”
The only time that splitscreen filming got sticky was during a fight scene: “I picked up a cream pie and smooshed it into her face with great delight, completely forgetting she’d have to replicate that action!”
Mills is 71 now, but her trim, jeans-clad figure and bright laugh suggest some- one much younger. She reminisced over green tea across the street from City Center, home to “Party Face,” a black comedy in which she plays a chic and very controlling mother. When she walked out onstage the other day in pink satin pants, the audience burst into applause.
Americans tend to remember her old movies best, Mills says. All told, she made six Disney films before moving on to other films, TV and theater. Unlike Lohan and many other child stars, however, Mills retained both success and sanity. Still, she says, she can see how one can go wrong.
“It’s a very powerful magnet, this business,” she muses. “It’s easy to be pulled this way and that and lose your sense of reality.”
She says her parents — actor John Mills and actress/ writer Mary Hayley Bell — kept her and her older sister, Juliet, grounded. When Hay- ley won a special juvenile Oscar for 1960’s “Pollyanna,” she didn’t accept it: Her parents had her stay in school and finish her exams.
But there were other perks, such as visiting Walt Disney’s home, where she rode his model train around the garden and watched films — Disney ones, naturally — in his home theater. “You’d lean back in those wonderful reclining seats, and your hand would somehow disappear into a bowl of M&M’s,” she recalls. There was even a soda fountain in the back, where Disney whipped up icecream sodas and sundaes.
Fans sent her things — a diamond ring from America (she sent it back) and a monkeyfur rug from Africa (that went back too). Mills herself was obsessed with Elvis Presley. She wrote to him and was devastated not to hear anything back. Since then, she says, she answers all her fan mail. “It’s so important to get a response,” she says, “to know that what you’ve sent hasn’t disappeared into a void.” Hers seems like a charmed life, one that included not only awards, a pop hit and charity work but also two sons — one of them, singer/ songwriter Crispian Mills, by her ex, director Roy Boulting, 33 years her senior. In 1997, she met Firdous Bamji, when they starred together in “The King and I.” He’s 20 years younger than Mills, “but it’s the person you notice,” she says, “not the age.” They’ve been together ever since. Soon to come is another play she’ll perform with her sister, Juliet. For now, there’s “Party Face,” where people wait for her at the stage door to tell her how much her films meant to them, especially in troubled times. “They say the characters I played gave them hope,” she says. “And that’s such a gift to me, that something I did made a difference!”