When 14-year-old Hayley Mills won a special Oscar for her 1960 performance in the title role in Pollyanna, Producer Walt Disney predicted that she would mature "into an actress more beautiful than Elizabeth Taylor and more talented than any star in motion pictures." He was not far wrong. Today, Hayley Mills lacks only Liz's animal splendors. At 21, she is prettier than her pictures, and a natural actress of growing authority and range.
Hayley came of age as a performer this month with the release of the poignant British comedy The Family Way (TIME, July 14). Playing a young newlywed, she gives an affecting portrayal through a difficult and delicate metamorphosis of moods. She is vulnerable as the courted virgin, bemused and forgiving at her raucous wedding reception, exquisitely graceful in a kitchen bathtub scene, and ineffably tender when her husband proves temporarily impotent. What is most telling about her talent is that she has survived many cloying movie roles without picking up Hollywood tricks or mannerisms; the keynote of her performance is an overpowering honesty.
Marquee Names. Looking back now, Hayley feels she was too dependent too long on her family. Until she was 19, her parents picked all her film roles. That seems understandable enough, since her father is Actor John Mills (Tunes of Glory), one of Britain's peerless pros, and her mother is Playwright Mary Hayley Bell. When the family was not on location, Hayley grew up in Berkeley Square, or on a Kent farm, and was educated at Elmhurst Ballet School. She and her brother Jonathan and sister Juliet were warned that the theater was "a jungle." But just in case, recalls their mother, "I made sure I gave them names that would look nice on a marquee." Juliet, 25, is a West End actress, and Jonathan, 17, is a budding director. Hayley got into lights at age twelve when Film Director J. Lee Thompson saw her riding horseback and decided to test her for a part originally intended for a boy. She won, and stole the film—the 1960 thriller Tiger Bay.
That led to her long-term Disney contract—and Pollyanna, The Parent Trap, The Castaways, Summer Magic, The Moon Spinners and That Darn Cat. "Even though the stories weren't very real and the characters were essentially cardboard," she says, "I was learning the mechanics of my craft, and had a chance to indulge myself." But not too much. "If I got good notices for something," she recalls, "my family just said, That's very nice, dear. Now go and make your bed.'"
In between what she called the "goody-good" or "frilly-knickers" Hollywood films, she bit off some more demanding parts back home, including two in works written by her mother, Whistle Down the Wind and Gypsy Girl. The family, however, vetoed one particularly gamy role: the lead in Lolita. She was 14 then, and sees now that "I wasn't ready for it."