“Tales that warm the heart and lift the spirit are a much-needed tonic at this time,” says Hayley Mills.
The actress, who shot to fame as a teenager, starring in Disney productions including Pollyanna and The Parent Trap, heads the cast of a new stage adaptation of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
The production is touring the country ahead of its transfer to London’s West End, and Norwich Theatre Royal is its next stop.
Hayley describes it as a “beautiful story of love and the importance of new beginnings.”
The feel-good show is based on the best-selling novel by Deborah Moggach, which in turn became a much-loved film starring Dame Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Maggie Smith, Penelope Wilton, Tom Wilkinson, Celie Imrie, Ronald Pickup and Dev Patel.
It follows an eclectic group of retirees as they embark on a new life in India. The luxury residence they expect is far from the opulence they were promised, but as their lives begin to intertwine and they embrace the vibrancy of India they are charmed in unexpected ways.
The story shines a light on issues such as the outsourcing of care and NHS treatments, the complexity of family relationships, love, compassion and companionship in our twilight years.
Hayley steps into Dame Judi’s shoes to play Evelyn Greenslade, opposite Paul Nicholas – who also starred in the BBC’s BAFTA-nominated documentary series Real Marigold Hotel, which was inspired by the book and film - and Rula Lenska.
She is also a patron of the annual autumn Hostry Festival which is held at Norwich Cathedral and will be talking about her recent autobiography, Forever Young, with artistic director Stash Kirkbride on Sunday, October 30.
Hayley says she’s looking forward to being back in Norwich as it’s a place that is “close to my heart”.
Her father, acting legend Sir John Mills, was born in Norfolk, living at Belton, near Gorleston and at Felixstowe when he was growing up.
Young John attended Sir John Leman School at Beccles and aged 11 he played Puck in the school's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. At 12 he went to the old Norwich High School for Boys in Upper St Giles where, in 2000, he and his daughter Juliet discovered his name 'LEW' - which he used to call himself - still carved in the brickwork of the building.
He even had a trial with Norwich City Football Club – but was told he was too small and to eat some rice pudding and come back the next year.
But he had known since the age of six that he wanted to be in the spotlight on the stage rather than the football pitch. He went on to make more than 120 films over seven decades and won a best supporting actor Oscar for his challenging and moving role in Ryan’s Daughter.
In Ipswich, the Sir John Mills Theatre is part of the Eastern Angles Centre, home of the touring theatre company which takes productions out to communities all across the region.
Hayley says her father had fond memories of his East Anglian upbringing – and that she loved it when he performed his Suffolk accent.
“I know my dad went back there when he was quite an old man and visited the places that he’d lived where he was brought up. He went with my sister, Juliet, and he hadn’t been there for many, many years,” she says.
“We used to love it when our father gave us his Suffolk accent, it’s a lovely sound. In those days, if you wanted to be an actor you had to get rid of your regional accent and one of the wonderful things about today is that people don’t, so we have this wonderful variety of accents in our world still instead of everyone sounding like the BBC.”
Hayley’s own acting career began at the age of just nine and she was 12-years-old when she made her first feature film, Tiger Bay.
She won an Honorary Oscar at the age of 13 for her leading performance in Walt Disney’s Pollyanna and went on to star in such films as The Parent Trap, Whistle Down the Wind, The Family Way, Endless Night, and Appointment With Death.
More recent screen credits include ITV’s Wild at Heart, Moving On and Pitching In for BBC One, Compulsion for Channel 5 and the festive time travel film, Last Train to Christmas.
She spent the first coronavirus lockdown writing her autobiography, Forever Young.
The catalyst was, she says, taking a trip down memory lane at Walt Disney Studios, where she got her big Hollywood break, a few years ago.
“I know it does seem odd to have waited so long to write my autobiography, but it can take a lifetime to make sense of your childhood and especially if your childhood, which it does for us all, has a big impact on the rest of your life,” she says.
“It’s something that I’d thought about doing and I’d attempted to do many times and I’d given up on it.
“Then in 2016, I was invited to Disney studios and I was taken to Walt Disney’s office that had been put back together again.
“It was exactly how it was when he was there and it wasn’t just a replica it was the real thing. They’d packed everything away when he died, having photographed every inch of the office and then put it away in boxes and 50-60 years later they got it all out, put it all back.
“It was like walking back into the past and I expected him to come walking through the door at any minute. It was an extraordinary experience.
“Then I was given access to the archives and I was able to look through these amazing boxes full of letters from Walt to me and me to him, and my parents to him and memos and a lot of very interesting things that I didn’t even know about.
“When I came back and I told my family all about it they all said you must write it. I didn’t have the confidence to be able to write a book that anybody would care to read, but my eldest son, Crispian, said he would help me.
“He is a screenwriter and a musician and he writes wonderful music, and so he showed me how important structure was: the beginning, the middle and end, not just of the whole book, but the beginning and middle and end of every chapter.”
Before the pandemic, Hayley had found a literary agent and publisher, and spent the lockdown writing.
“It was a very frightening time and when lockdown first happened we were all so fearful, weren’t we?” she says. “But the peace and quiet was tremendously helpful if you had a writing project: no aeroplanes, no cars, just the birds and every day having to focus on something and not be distracted by all the other demands of one’s life.”
And while parts of Hayley’s life as a child star working for the biggest name in the entertainment business seem impossibly glamorous, away from the cameras she still had the same adolescent difficulties to cope with as we all do.
“It was extraordinary, but what I realised when I was writing is that I was going through what everybody goes through. Everybody struggles through adolescence, where we are leaving the familiar world of childhood behind, you’re moving into this unknown territory of responsibility and adulthood and you just don’t know if you’re going to be any good at it and it’s quite frightening, actually.
“So many of us think we want to grow up, but actually we don’t, deep down, and so I realised really that what I was going through was a universal experience. So that encouraged me to keep going because I thought well people are actually going to be able to identify with this because they’ve gone through the same thing.”
As well as her father being an actor, her mother, Mary Hayley Bell, was a writer. Does she think she was destined to go down a creative path?
“In a sense, because it was a world that I knew,” she says. “I remember a very, very, very early interview when I was doing Pollyanna, somebody saying why did you want to become an actress, or words to that effect and I said well, in my family if you can act then you have to, this is what we do.
“I’d been to the studios so often with my father and I’d watched him from the wings when he was rehearsing a play and it was all very familiar. And also, I was still at an age when I was playing my own games, my own imaginary games, so playing a part, but being in front of the camera, was not a million miles from what I was doing every day anyway. I loved it, it was wonderful.”
Hayley was spotted by Walt Disney after appearing in her debut film, Tiger Bay.
“After Tiger Bay, I wasn’t offered any work or any jobs by anybody for about a year, and everyone forgot about it - we thought that was just a one-off thing. And then Walt Disney got in touch with my father’s agent saying that he wanted to meet me.
“He was looking for a child to play the part of Pollyanna for the film that he was making and he hadn’t been able to find anybody. And one of his producers, a lovely man called Bill Anderson, was in London and happened to see Tiger Bay in the cinema and he told Walt this child might be worth thinking about.
“He had to buy a copy of the film from the Rank Organisation because they wouldn’t lend it to him, and flew to LA. Walt saw the film, said she’s great, that’s who I want, and then flew to London and I met him in the Dorchester Hotel in the Harlequin Suite and that was it - that meeting changed the course of my life,” she says.
Hayley describes Walt Disney as “one of the nicest people I’ve ever met”.
“He was humble, gentle, he had a lovely sense of humour, genuinely liked children and was interested in them and he listened to what they had to say, and he loved what he did,” she says.
“He wasn’t a remote boss that you never saw, he was involved in the films that were being made at his studios and knew all the people on the lot and the crew, he knew people’s names.”
What was it like for her, suddenly finding herself on a Hollywood film set?
“The first day was quite mind boggling it was all so huge. And hot. We were out on location in southern California in a beautiful part on the coast called Carmel,” she remembers.
“Tiger Bay had been so second nature, I was just wearing a pair of old jeans and a jumper the whole time and the character was not a million miles away from me, and suddenly I’m dressed up in period clothes and wearing a wig and very squeaky white boots.
“It took a while to kind of integrate into all of that and the first morning I think was pretty nerve wracking for the director, David Swift.
“They didn’t get a shot in the can because I just wasn’t concentrating, there were too many other things to think about. Particularly the doughnuts on the catering truck - I was obsessed with American food!
“And my father had to give me a real kick up the backside at lunch and tell me to pull my finger out because I was being boring. So, in the afternoon I managed to get into my stride.”
And she says that dividing her time between America and LA kept her grounded.
“I lived in different worlds, the world of making movies in Hollywood, driving around in limousines and people running to pick up after you and then back to boarding school in England and only being allowed to wash your hair once a week, things like that.
“It kept my feet on the ground and because I kept leaving Hollywood I could look back and look at it objectively, it didn’t become who I was,” she says.
Hayley Mills stars in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel at Norwich Theatre Royal from October 25-29. Box office: norwichtheatre.org/01603 630000.
She will be in conversation with Stash Kirkbride about her memoir, Forever Young, at the Hostry Festival, Norwich Cathedral, on Sunday October 30 at 1pm. For more information see hostryfestival.org
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here