Looking back at her experience was working alongside the late actress, the Sharon McKendrick and Susan Evers depicter calls her on-screen mother 'a real force of nature.'
- Jun 28, 2021
AceShowbiz - Veteran actress Hayley Mills has marked the 60th anniversary of her hit Disney film "The Parent Trap" by paying tribute to her late movie mum Maureen O'Hara.
Mills played a pair of twins in the original film, which later became a vehicle for Lindsay Lohan, and she admits the highlight of the experience was working alongside O'Hara.
"She was wonderful, absolutely wonderful," Mills tells EW.com. "I remember I was very in awe of her in the beginning, she was so very real and down to earth. She was very Irish. She was very warm and demonstrative, and extremely talkative."
"She never stopped talking and laughing and hugging you. She was a real force of nature. When she walked on set there was this energy telling us that Maureen had arrived. And she was so beautiful. I couldn't take my eyes off of her when I first met her. It was all natural, too. She took her beauty for granted but I never did, because I had never seen anyone so beautiful."
Former child star Mills explains that to this day "The Parent Trap" remains one of her favorite films - because it had such a powerful message.
"It's very high on my list because it's a good movie, it had a good script, and it had wonderful actors," she adds. "But it was also about something important. It was about children dealing with divorce, and it came out at a time when more and more families were breaking up."
"When I went to boarding school, there was this one girl in my class whose parents were divorced, and she was so unhappy about that and she felt ashamed. But she never admitted she was. When the 60s kicked in, people were getting divorced and the impact on the children was dreadful."
