M Night Shyamalan gives a key role in his new thriller Trap to the British actor Hayley Mills. We look at the welcome return of an acting legend.
The first time you see her in M Night Shyamalan’s Trap, she emerges from a van with FBI plastered on the back of her coat, looking away from camera, as an ominous note plays. Shyamalan is building suspense and establishing the trap of the title, into which Hayley Mills plays a key part.
As forensic profiler Dr. Josephine Grant, Mills spends much of Trap describing the psychology of ‘The Butcher’, the heinous, at large serial killer the FBI use the concert of Taylor Swift-alike Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan) to try and arrest. Another character describes her as a legend in her field, having caught over ten such murderers across what is presumably a long career.
She is, therefore, someone right out of a Thomas Harris novel. A Will Graham catching her fair share of Hannibals. You might expect such a character, unusual in being an older woman, to be played by a female American actor of renown. If not perhaps Meryl Streep then maybe a Jamie Lee Curtis or Joan Allen. Yet Shyamalan went for someone completely unexpected, someone many audience members (at least in America) might not even know the significance of. As Mills recounted to the Hollywood Reporter: “It’s a part I would have never expected to be considered for.”
Hayley Mills is approaching eighty but feels, to cinema audiences now of a certain age, immortal. Her first screen credit was, astonishingly, back in 1947, when only one years old, in a film called So Well Remembered. It was about a town mayor working to rebuild his Lancashire mill, helmed by Edward Dmytryk, a journeyman director known principally for 1954’s The Caine Mutiny. So what was an incredibly young Hayley doing in movies that early?
The answer is an obvious one: her father played the main character. Sir John Mills stands as one of the titans of British filmmaking across especially the first half of the 20th century. He was a bankable star portraying classical characters and traditional British heroes, with memorable turns especially for David Lean in 1946’s Great Expectations and 1970’s Ryan’s Daughter, for which he nabbed an Oscar. Sir John carried on working right up to the year of his death in 2005, aged 97, with small but memorable turns in more recent films such as the first Bean big screen film or Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet in the 1990s.
Sir John had three children with his wife, playwright Mary Hayley Bell, who were married for 64 years and who passed away shortly after him. One of these children was Trap’s Hayley, who following her turn as a baby in the now ironically titled So Well Remembered, she began what would turn out to be a prolific youthful career as a film star in 1959’s Tiger Bay for J Lee Thompson (who just three years later would make Cape Fear), as a tomboy who witnesses a murder by her boyfriend. She won a BAFTA for Most Promising Newcomer for the role.
It was a role launching a career that, in the 1960s, perhaps even eclipsed her own father’s briefly. The next break came thanks to one famous cinematic figure: Walt Disney. He had in production a film called Pollyanna in 1959, and along with director David Swift, had grown weary after auditioning over 350 girls for the titular part of a young Christian girl who arrives in a turn of the century English town and has a powerful impact on the townsfolk. Walt then came to London with his wife on a shopping trip, saw Tiger Bay, and finally after some trepidation, both Walt and Swift acceded to the advice of their wives who insisted Hayley was their Pollyanna.
The film emerged in 1960 and was an instant hit with Mills in the role, and she quickly morphed into one of the most successful live action Disney players of the decade. The Parent Trap followed in 1961, again with Swift; arguably the role she became most famous for and perhaps never quite escaped. She played twin sisters Susan Evers and Sharon McKendrick, who swap places in a scheme to reunite their divorced parents. An enormously charming film, it was one that Mills would evoke in three TV movie sequels across the 1980s after her cinematic heyday.
Following The Parent Trap, however, the roles poured in. Bryan Forbes’ Whistle Down the Wind in 1961; films for directors such as Ronald Neame and Robert Stevenson (who around this time made Mary Poppins); portraying plucky young girls in adventure films such as The Moon-Spinners (1964) or The Truth About Spring (1965), and in 1966 she takes on the more dramatic role of a traumatised young girl in Sky West And Crooked (1966), directed by Sir John himself (the only film he ever made), and co-written by her mother. A true family affair.
Hayley was 20 by this point, so the Pollyanna-ish (so popular it became a verb) child star she became known for could no longer sustain itself as she transformed into motherhood at the peak of the swinging 60s. As counterculture changed British cinema, so Hayley also began to move into a different realm of filmmaking, such as with John and Roy Boulting’s controversial The Family Way, also in 1966, in which she performed a nude scene quite in contrast to her Disney persona. Equally controversial was her affair with and later marriage, plus children, with Boulting – 33 years her senior. That’s another story.
There were still charming roles in innocent fare, such as Ida Lupino’s The Trouble With Angels (1966), as one of two students at a Catholic boarding school causing trouble for Rosalind Russell’s Mother Superior (a huge hit, in the end), or the Noel Coward story Pretty Polly (1967), a tender film about a young woman in India. But she also dabbled in darker thrillers such as Roy Boulting’s Twisted Nerve (1967), as the figure of infatuation for Hywel Bennett’s disturbed stalker, or the object of desire for cheeky Oliver Reed and his crew in Jonathan Miller’s Take a Girl Like You (1970). She had by this point begun to move away from her Disney origins.
As she entered the 1970s, however, the roles began drying up, with no real films or performances of significant note, and after 1975’s The Kingfisher Caper opposite David McCallum, adapted by Roy Boulting from Wilbur Smith’s novel, she dropped out of the film industry. She had young children, her marriage to Boulting would soon fall apart, and perhaps she was too tethered to her childhood roles to be accepted as a grown-up performer in a grittier decade of cinema.
Her steady return in the 1980s came through a raft of appearances on popular American television shows of the period – The Love Boat, Tales of the Unexpected, Murder, She Wrote, Amazing Stories and so on. She even had her own sitcom in the late 1980s, Good Morning, Miss Bliss, playing a recently widowed teacher at an Indianapolis school helping her students, opposite luminaries such as Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Dustin Diamond – a show remarkably cancelled and reformatted soon after as the far more successful Saved By The Bell, of which Mills was not a part.
You can’t help feel Mills had fallen somewhat at this point, treading water when, by rights, she should have been an established Helen Mirren-esque figure of British stage and screen. The 1990s and 2000s she disappears almost entirely from screens, resurfacing finally primarily on British television screens in such fare as Wild At Heart, Midsomer Murders (hasn’t everyone been in that?) and Death In Paradise. But you could argue the last five years have been her most prolific in decades on a cinematic level.
Mills has cropped up in films such as 2021’s comedy Last Train To Christmas, or jaunty senior cinema such as 2024’s Arthur’s Whisky, headlined by Diane Keaton and, uh, Lulu. She even popped up in Amazon’s epic Robert Jordan adaptation The Wheel Of Time. Trap, however, feels like something of a comeback role; a sizeable part in a suspense piece that will gain a larger audience than anything she has appeared in since at least the 1980s, and one that points to the kind of gravitas apparent in the ‘grand Dames’ of British cinema.
As Mills explained, “[Trap] came completely unexpected, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever make another movie — I wasn’t shedding any tears. People often look at you and think, ‘This is a Disney actress, isn’t it?’”
She appears to have had a wonderful time working with Shyamalan, bouncing off stars such as Josh Hartnett or opposite solid character actors such as Alison Pill, and admired the fact Shyamalan wrote, directed and funded the film himself. It appears to have reignited her love of making movies.
One final thought – did Shyamalan name her character after Katy Manning’s Doctor Who companion, Jo Grant? Is this a nod and a wink to a classic British institution and one that refuses to go away? Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, in Hayley Mills’ case, it seems fitting she would be given that name. She refuses to go away. Let’s hope she never does.
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