Hayley Mills was one of Hollywood’s earliest child superstars, appearing in a host of Disney classics in the Sixties – but she’s revealed that a “crook” helped her lose much of her fortune.
Mills, 80, shared her experiences with money on Gyles Brandreth’s Rosebud Podcast, where she remembered the earliest days of her fame. As a child, Mills signed a lucrative deal with Disney to star in a number of movies, among them The Parent Trap (1961), That Darn Cat! (1965) and In Search of the Castaways (1962).
Mills said that at the peak of her celebrity she was encouraged to put her earnings into a trust by a solicitor named Stanley Passmore, who had previously worked with Mills’s actor father Sir John Mills.
“Stanley also advised Daddy, and not very well,” she told Brandreth, who added: “I do know the background of this, and it’s partly because you were poorly advised. But also, it was partly to do with the naïveté of your father, I think. There was an innocence about him and a sort of optimism.”
Mills’ trust was subsequently engulfed in the 90 per cent super-tax rate of the era, which was installed to help Britain recover after the Second World War.
She recalled: “When I reached 21, instead of being given the key to the door, I was handed an envelope across a green baize tablecloth by Stanley, which was the Inland Revenue basically saying, ‘Thank you. You owe us 90 per cent of your earnings’.”
Mills admitted that she’d never been skilled at handling money, and was unsure what it meant for her finances or her career.
“Stanley laughed and said, ‘Well, I think it means you have to move to America [for work].’ And that’s all he ever said,” Mills added. “He was a crook. He didn’t give a flying Dutchman.”
Mills sought legal advice in clawing back her earnings, and appealed to the British government. But she eventually lost her appeal, meaning that she lost millions of dollars.
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She told The Times in 2021 that she wished she had the opportunity to rest and enjoy financial security, rather than work in America out of necessity.
“The main thing it would have given me is the freedom to say no and not to have to go to America for work,” she said. “My son had to go to boarding school when he was 10. I didn’t want him to go, but I wasn’t there. I regret that very, very much.”
Despite the blow to her bank balance, Mills maintained a steady acting career in the US, starring in the sitcom Good Morning, Miss Bliss (which was retooled as Saved by the Bell) and the Agatha Christie adaptation Appointment with Death. She returned to British screens in 2007, as one of the stars of the hit ITV drama Wild at Heart. In 2024 she made a surprise return to the big screen in M Night Shyamalan’s thriller Trap.
