One adjective invariably applied to Hayley Mills during her stint as a Disney child star in the 1960s was "spunky." That’s an attribute that will probably resurface when she plays New Yorker Susy Hendrix, the blind woman terrorized by thugs in Frederick Knott’s 1966 thriller Wait Until Dark at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis next week.
For Mills, now 57, the role is "a very tricky thing," as she explains over the phone from New York. "Blind people rely so much on their ears and their hearing that their whole focus and concentration is through that sense — through their sense of touch, perception, and intuition." There won’t be any updating of the script, which was made into a 1967 film starring Audrey Hepburn. "We did think about it initially being contemporary, but you wouldn’t leave a blind woman at home without a cell phone — the whole thing would fall apart."
Mills makes her Cape Playhouse debut with her son, actor Jason Lawson, who plays Mike, "the nice one" of the bad guys in the play. But she says there’s no nepotism: "I was already discussing doing something with Evans Haile, the [Cape Playhouse] artistic director, so when this play was suggested, it was Evans who said, ‘What about Jason?’ which just . . . clinched it, really." Mills’s voice is a crisply fluty soprano, with traces of the pluck of the Parent Trap twins. She wouldn’t dream of offering directorial advice to her child, though: "He’s 27 — well, virtually; it’s not like he’s 12."
Of course, when she was 12, she was on the brink of stardom. She’d made her film debut in Tiger Bay, with her father, actor John Mills, and caught the eye of Walt Disney, who signed her to a five-year contract. The years at Disney earned her a special Academy Award (for 1960’s Pollyanna) but not a role in Lolita, though she wouldn’t have minded trading imp for nymphet.
Mills is one of the rare child stars to have carved out a career before, during, and after adolescence. For the last score of years, she’s focused on stage work, having appeared in roles ranging from Anna in The King and I (which played Boston in 1997) to a turn in The Vagina Monologues. Theater agrees with her: "You can play a much greater range of age and character than in films." But she pooh-poohs the notion that as a former child actor she has much to teach co-star Elizabeth Lundberg, who plays Gloria, Susy’s helpful little neighbor. "Elizabeth loves what she’s doing, and she’s hardworking, and so she’s approaching it sensibly and seriously. She’s in it because that’s what she wants to do, not because she wants to be in magazines."
But then she warms to the topic of young actors. "You hope they’re learning their craft as actors. The theater is a wonderful school. It’s a great learning ground of fertile rich earth. Even if you only have two weeks, you have to do it in front of heaving, breathing people every night."
One enduring, if unexpected, legacy of Hayley Mills’s stardom is her name, which has become a Top 20 girl’s name in the last several years. "I was called Hayley because my mother’s surname was Hayley-Bell, and her father was called Hayley for short, and when she was pregnant with me, she desperately hoped for a son. But she was going to call whatever she had Hayley, and it was a girl, so she decided to call it Hayley. So, really, we always maintained that it’s a boy’s name; I don’t know that anyone used it as a girl’s name." She pauses. "This is very convoluted," she laughs. "I obviously brought the name to people’s attention, and then it came to life."
Wait Until Dark is at the Cape Playhouse, Route 6A in Dennis, June 30 through July 12. Tickets are $25 to $45; call (508) 385-3911 or, toll free, (877) 385-3911.
