Forever Young: Hayley Mills' Reflections on a Life in the Spotlight

11.miller: Enjoyed reading this

United States on Oct 22, 2023

camms: I knew nothing about Hayley apart from seeing her in odd film but I love biographies so thought I’d give it a go. Lovely book well written. Extremely interesting reading about her films & acting & Disney & her family & her financial situation. Since reading this I’ve bought some of her old films to watch with new inside fact awareness. Highly recommended read about a lovely girl/woman.

United Kingdom on Sep 16, 2023

F. Pawley: Hayley Mills is 2 years older than I am. I remember seeing her in Tiger Bay and then The Parent Trap. I couldn't help compare, the years she mentions throughout the book, with the same time as myself. Reading about such privilege was upsetting. While she is flitting off to fancy locations I was living in dire poverty without a decent piece of clothing to wear. Flying here there and everywhere ruined her education, even though she went to boarding and finishing school. Decisions were made for her all the way along the line, and the money she earned was banked for her in a Trust Fund. It turned out she had worked on 7 films for nothing in the end, as the greedy Taxman helped himself to her Trust Fund money and she had to pay a solicitor vast amounts to 'help' her. I loved reading about her relationship with her family, but sadly this fizzled out when she became involved with Roy Boulting and no further mention was made after around 2/3rds of the book. The book is hurried from this point - clearly in an effort to get it done and published. It would have been nice to have read about her relationship with Lawson (the father of her second child) but as he is/was married to Twiggy, this...

United Kingdom on Sep 14, 2023

Charles C: Fell in love with Hayley Mills when I saw her in my very first film at the cinema - Pollyanna. Still have the picture book. Wrote to her as a little boy, didn't get a response, but, reading this, now know why. A fascinating glimpse into the not-so glamorous life of a movie star. The Disney princess.
Brought back so many memories, not just of her, but of her family and the derision of the press at her marriage to a Boulting Brother old enough to be her father... remember the cartoons. Then I did the same. Can you imagine if we had social media back then?
Littered with stories of well-known British actors and their films, this is a book that takes you behind the scenes of one of our premier acting families. Well worth a read.

United Kingdom on May 16, 2023

Cara Ibertsen: I have followed and admired Hayley Mills from when I first saw her in Disney's Pollyanna at the pictures when I was a five year old. Then I loved and identified with her when I saw her in Whistle Down The Wind a year later. This film became one of my favourites of all time because I was Susan, a Lancashire lassie. Over the years I managed to catch all of Hayley's Disney films, her teenager films and most of her adult films. It was only last year that I managed to watch Tiger Bay, her first acting role in a film starring her father John Mills (who was one of my father's favourite actors). From that film you could tell she had a natural acting talent and a huge future ahead of her.

Forever Young, Hayley Mills' memoir, is told in a naturalistic and gracious style; I could easily hear her recognisable voice throughout as she related the stories of growing up within an acting family, a world of theatre, a world of film; with anecdotes told about all the old and young British film stars of the day, names that are still recognised today (by me anyway). She covers all her early years in film, the Disney years, her teenage years, up to and including her years as wife to Director Roy...

United Kingdom on Mar 15, 2023

Linda Pfeiffer: Reading this book, I also relived my childhood as Haley Mills and I are of the same generation and her childhood on film was part of what formed my real childhood in the 50's and 60's. I saw a couple of her Walt Disney Movies before seeing her in Tiger Bay, although that was not the order they were released. As if she was my older sister, I either went through or wanted to go through everything she did on film. Right up to her first screen kiss on Crete, in The Moonspinners. Reading her book, I learned that she loved the Beatles, as I did between 1963 and 1969, but she actually had a date with George Harrison. A Beatlemaniac's ideal dream. In her twenties, she met and married a much older man, Roy, one of the famous Boulting Brothers of UK film production and had a son with him. After that her film career faltered along with her marriage to him. There were other men, and another son, but I lost track of her until I saw her memoir and caught up on her news once again. I'm glad I did as it mostly covered some of the most memorable parts of my early childhood to my late teens and I thank her for bringing those memories back to me so vividly.

Canada on Dec 31, 2022

Anthony Flood: I bought this book on a lark. According to the biosketches I’ve read of another British actress, Hayley Atwell, she was not only born the year I met my wife, but also named after Hayley Mills, on whom I had had a prepubescent crush. From "Forever Young," Mills’s memoir, I wasn’t expecting much beyond satisfying idle curiosity.

Her engaging narrative quickly won me over, however, which surprised me. She acknowledges those who helped her with the writing, in the first place her son Crispian, who encouraged her to push past self-doubt and surface so many submerged stories. But she typed every word. The diary passages have a verisimilitude about them: they ring true as expressions of a denizen of England and America in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, not reconstructions.

Surprised, because movie studio-provided tutors governed her early education, and this doesn’t explain how she can write more coherently, let alone elegantly, than today’s average graduate (which I hope will not be interpreted as damning with faint praise!). Perhaps her parents (actor John Mills and actress-writer Mary Hayley Bell) bequeathed to her a genetic predisposition that made up for what...

United States on Mar 12, 2022

A Reader: This is an honest and introspective account of this outstanding actress's story of her youth. Ms. Mills rocketed to cinematic stardom while barely a teenager. Her father was a prominent British actor and her mother an accomplished writer. At age 12, without any training in acting, she was cast as a tomboy in the noir film Tiger Bay, in which her father appeared. Shortly thereafter, Walt Disney signed her to a long-term contract in the early 1960s and she would do a number of films for Disney - the first two, Pollyanna (for which she won a special Academy Award) and The Parent Trap, were mega-hits, and she would thereafter forever be identified as a child star - hence, the title of the book - Forever Young. Full disclosure: like a number of other reviewers, I am a contemporary of Ms. Mills and like countless adolescent boys at the time, had something of a crush on her. Her accounts of doing the films for Disney are worth reading on their own. But there is much more here.

Ms. Mills is extraordinarily honest about the challenges and struggles her unique career brought about. When in her twenties, she played Peter Pan on the stage, and she came to the realization that she was...

United States on Jan 05, 2022