She’s been on the list since the beginning, and I keep putting her off in the vague belief that I do too many people connected with Disney and need to focus on others. For Deep Nostalgia Month, I decided it was time. (As you may have noticed, “nostalgia” often means “Disney” for me.) Besides, Disney had such a good knack for picking quality performers that I could do at least a month of people you didn’t realize had done Disney movies. If I hadn’t decided Sean Connery was too lousy a person to celebrate, he could have been in that month, and you’d better believe I would have linked to a video of him singing.
Hayley Mills does not seem to be a lousy person. What’s more, I think she’s an underrated actress. It is, I think, an unfortunate aspect of being a child performer. Mills is the last recipient of the former honorary children’s Oscars they used to give out. (For Pollyanna.) On the one hand, there’s the advantage that children just don’t tend to get Oscars, no matter how quality the performance. Ask Hailee Steinfeld. On the other, there is a tendency to treat even the best children’s performance as a novelty, to give it less consideration than a less accomplished performance from an adult.
When Hayley Mills was a child, she appeared in movies with Karl Malden, Jane Wyman, Agnes Moorehead, Adolphe Menjou, Brian Keith, Maureen O’Hara, Maurice Chevalier, George Sanders, Burl Ives, Dorothy McGuire, Deborah Kerr, Eli Wallach, Irene Papas, and Pola Negri. Not to mention John Mills, of course. Stretch that out even just until she was twenty, and you can add quite a few others. Heck, I can add others even without that; this may just have been a half-dozen movies, but they’re movies with stacked casts. Was she the best performer in them? No, not at all. But she held her own, and with a cast like that, that may be all you can ask.
Her adult career has not been quite so exemplary. She was in as many movies in her first twenty years as in all the years since then, and there’s not a one I’d consider a classic. (Fond as I am of the Peter Ustinov Poirot movies.) She’s done some TV, including the underrated made-for-Disney Back Home, but nothing most people talk about except for Good Morning, Miss Bliss, which is best known for becoming Saved by the Bell after she left. She’s a Disney Legend, at least, but it feels as though no one much talks about anything she made after she turned fifteen.
Heck, in my opinion, that misses out on some of her best Disney films! She renovates an old house in Maine in Summer Magic and fights jewel thieves in The Moon-Spinners. I’m not terrible into In Search of the Castaways or That Darn Cat! But just today, I saw what may be probably her best-known non-Disney movie, 1966’s The Trouble With Angels, costarring Rosalind Russell and directed by Ida Lupino. I have to tell you, it’s not a bad addition if you’re looking to see more movies directed by and starring women.
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