Legends! Media Conference with Hayley Mills, Juliet Mills and Maxwell Caufield

Hayley Mills
Inset pic- Hayley Mills. Featured Pic- Hayley Mills, Maxwell Caufield and Juliet Mills. Pics by Greg Gorman

Hayley and Juliet Mills are adamant there are no parallels between them and the feuding, fading movie stars they are playing in Legends, which is set for Sydney in June.

The daughters of the great British actor Sir John Mills, they also insist there is no rivalry between them, unlike the characters – Leatrice Monsee (Hayley Mills) and Sylvia Glenn (Juliet Mills), famous for their off-stage bickering. The hustling theatre producer is played by Maxwell Caulfield, who also happens to be Juliet’s husband in real life.

The trio has been brought out here by local producer John Frost, who also produced the Tony Award-winning The King and I in 1991 in which Hayley starred as well as Noel Coward’s Fallen Angels, a vehicle for both sisters the following year.

“We went through many scripts trying to decide on what we wanted to do and I then thought Legends (by James Kirkwood) because it is a great role for two actresses of a certain age and it is a great role for a middle aged male,” Frost told a press conference in Sydney on the first day of rehearsals.

Younger sister Hayley said she was attracted to the play because it was very funny and very true about “our business”.

“It has quite a lot to say about business, about women in the business, about surviving in the business, about people ageing in the business, how egos suffer in the business,” Hayley said.

Of her character, Juliet said: ‘I’ve always had to play the tramps and the hookers and she (Leatrice Monsee) is always playing the nuns and the saints and the nurses. And I’m sick of all that.”

In the end they realise there are a lot more similarities than differences between them.

And what of real life?

Juliet, who is possibly best known here for the 1970s TV sitcom, Nanny and The Professor, said: “There’s nothing better than working with somebody you love and trust and admire because that’s only going to help and then to have Maxwell thrown in is just the icing on the cake for me.

“There never has been rivalry really. Our careers have been very different. I don’t think we’ve ever gone up for the same part….I’ve always been thrilled for Hayley’s success and she for me.”

Hayley agreed: “We’re very, very, very lucky to have had the parents that we had because they were in the business. (Their mother, Mary Hayley Mills wrote the book, Whistle Down the Wind, which was adapted as a film starring Hayley and Alan Bates in 1961.) And they had a very sensible approach to it…. It was a job and you took it seriously. We knew because we were born into it how hard it was actually. You have to be at a certain level physically, emotionally, spiritually all the time when you’re working however ill you’re feeling even when your life is falling apart…. It’s a very unpredictable business.

“If you’re always thrilled about people you know getting on and getting work, that’s the key really.”

Speaking later to Sydneyartsguide, Hayley Mills  –  said to have been the most popular child actress of the early 1960s – told how she snared her early roles, first the lead in 1959’s Tiger Bay, which co-starred her father.

“The director J Lee Thompson came to see my father about playing the part of the inspector. The film originally was about a little boy who sees a murder…..when he met me he thought perhaps it could be a girl so he offered me the part.”

Then when Walt Disney was casting Pollyanna, Disney’s wife suggested Hayley, having been in London where she had seen Tiger Bay.

“I met him (Disney) at the Dorchester Hotel, played around on the floor with our pet Pekinese and that was it. It was so easy. I never consciously made a decision, I am going to be an actress. I just became one.”

Hayley’s depiction of the orphaned girl who moved in with her aunt in the 1960 film won her a special Academy Award (the last person to receive the Juvenile Oscar). But nobody who saw The Parent Trap (1961) will ever forget her as twins Sharon and Susan who reunite their parents, particularly when she sings Let’s get Together as a duet with herself!

She said the difference perhaps between her experience and that of other child stars was that she never moved to Hollywood.

“I always lived in England. Until I was 15 I was at a boarding school in England and then I left and I was at a finishing school in Switzerland for six months…I had a life outside films and Hollywood.”

She also never went to formal acting school but “picked things up on the way”.

“I think my attitude is very different to others.

“I wasn’t driven but then I discovered what I loved to do, so the rest is history.”

  • Legends is on at the Theatre Royal from Thursday, June 18.