Forever Young, by Hayley Mills book review

Incidents like these form the heart of Mills’s “Forever Young,” an affectionate-but clear-eyed memoir of an unusual career that began at 12, swelled to global proportions during puberty then, in young adulthood, dwindled into something quieter. Happenstance played some part in that journey, but so did genes. Mills’s father, John, was a highly regarded actor; her mother, Mary Hayley Bell, a novelist and playwright; her older sister, Juliet, a former ballerina and ascending actress. Young Hayley, by contrast, was a tomboy with big teeth and “a nose someone once described as a lump of putty.” Even when she was cast alongside her father in a British indie called “Tiger Bay,” she shrugged off the critical plaudits, she says, put aside any thoughts of career and went back to tearing around her family’s 14th-century Sussex farmhouse.