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Quite without warning, she erupts into a mini-rant. “I always think of that song, My Way, by Frank Sinatra. ‘Regrets, I’ve had a few, but, then again, too few to mention.’ What utter nonsense! We’ve all made hundreds of mistakes. And isn’t that how you learn? I hate that song. It’s so smug, so unreal, so arrogant.”
We have met in a sun-filled courtyard outside a Scout hall in south-west London where she’s rehearsing a stage adaptation of Deborah Moggach’s novel The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, subsequently a hit film.
Hayley is 76 now but as recognisable and pretty as her youthful incarnation, the hair worn ash blonde, the eyes still a sparkling blue, the manner friendly and unforced.
The production kicks off in Richmond, London, tomorrow and then criss-crosses the UK until next summer although leading cast members – Rula Lenska and Paul Nicholas alongside Hayley – are so far only committed until mid-February 2023.
After a long stay in New York, Hayley moved back to the UK about 12 years ago as her grandchildren started arriving. “I loved living in New York while retaining a pied-à-terre in London but the frequent transatlantic travel was proving too expensive so we made London our base.”
Her partner is Indian-born American actor Firdous Bamji. They met when they toured America in the title roles of The King And I. “We started off as friends and then it became more. And don’t you think that’s the best way?” He’s 20 years her junior (“totally irrelevant”) and they’ve now been together 25 years.
Hayley has two sons.
Crispian, 49, by her first husband, director Roy Boulting, 32 years her senior, and Jason (but everyone calls him Ace) from her relationship with actor Leigh Lawson, now the long-time partner and husband of Twiggy.
Next year, delayed by Covid, Hayley and big sister Juliet will appear in a play (“by a very famous living playwright but I daren’t say who”) with Ace directing.
Juliet and actor husband, Maxwell Caulfield, live in California. Younger brother Jonathan lives in Tasmania.
Hayley first found fame in 1959’s Tiger Bay, opposite her father, John Mills, and went on to star in Pollyanna, The Parent Trap and a raft of Disney movies.
And so to those regrets. Aged 15, she was offered the title role in the film of Lolita.
“I was rather keen to do it but Walt Disney and my parents were dead against it. And it’s true that it would have totally altered the trajectory of my career.”
“I’m not sure, though, that I would have had the level of awareness that Sue Lyon brought to the role.”
She won a childhood Oscar for Pollyanna but didn’t attend as she was back in boarding school.
“The whole thing was played down to such an extent that, instead of having a healthy sense of reality… the opposite began to take effect. I was left with the overwhelming conviction that somehow my lucky break had been a mistake – and I started to feel guilty about my success.”
On adjusting to, first, puberty and then adolescence, she says; “I hated my voice, my fat face, my spots. I became quite paranoid. I felt like a total failure as a person. I was like a small aeroplane in a tailspin; my confidence had collapsed and, along with it, my sense of self.”
“It was a conundrum for my parents to get the balance right. My father was working all the time so my care fell to my mother. She hated being apart from him and she hated Hollywood.”
It’s one of the reasons Mary Hayley Bell sought solace in the bottle. A highly regarded writer, Mary’s novel, Whistle Down The Wind, was adapted for the big screen, becoming one of Hayley’s most acclaimed films and one of her favourites.
In June 1966, aged 20, Hayley was cast in The Family Way opposite Hywel Bennett and directed by Roy Boulting. Required to be filmed in a hip bath, she was again assailed by negative body issues.
“It got to such a point that I started to seriously doubt whether they were bothering to put film in the camera when it came to my close-ups.
“Driving to Shepperton Studios one morning, I felt so desperate, so hopeless and wretched, so utterly consumed with gloom, that I resolved to end my life…I decided I’d put my foot down and accelerate. So I closed my eyes and just kept driving – and drove straight into a giant hedge.”
An invitation to join her father in Kenya, where he was making a movie, jolted her out of this vortex of negative introspection. “It was the best thing I could have done,” she writes in her refreshingly clear-eyed 2021 autobiography Forever Young.
“When you encounter the great aloneness of Africa, there’s a sort of recognition, a deep primal connection, and all the pettiness of one’s life falls away. Africa made me think and feel in a new way. I felt closer to God.”
By 1971, there had been two major events in her life. She’d fallen in love and married the much older Roy Boulting – and her tax affairs were in disarray.
“But I refuse to live my life haunted by what-ifs. I’ve been so lucky. I’m very grateful for the wonderful things that have come my way: my children, my grandchildren, my health, my partner of 25 years, my longrunning career. Bitterness,” says sweet, sorted Hayley Mills, “isn’t a good look.”
- The Best Exotic Marigold Hoteltour starts tomorrow: marigoldshow.com
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