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Stage and screen royalty hits Australia

by Jo-Anne Hui | 16 Apr 2015

Legendary screen and stage stars Hayley and Juliet Mills will be hitting stages across Australia this year for the premiere of theatre production, Legends! The pair will be joined by international heartthrob, Maxwell Caulfield, who previously starred in Dynasty and Grease 2.


Set in glamorous Manhattan, Legends! tells the hilarious tale of two fading actresses and rivals, Leatrice Monsee (Hayley Mills) and Sylvia Glenn (Juliet Mills) who are desperate to regain their position and forced to star together in a Broadway-bound play. Legends! will be playing in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide.

Well-known for their work in television and film, Hayley played the iconic dual role of the twins Susan and Sharon in The Parent Trap and won the Academy Juvenile Award for Pollyanna in 1960. Juliet gained popularity in the television sitcom Nanny and the Professor and won Emmy Awards for her fork in the mini-series QB VII and her role in the daytime drama series Passions. The twins were also the daughters of Academy Award-winning actor Sir John Mills and actress Mary Hayley Bell, so they both grew up in the spotlight from a very young age.

Juliet is particularly excited to return to Australia, who appeared in Barnaby and Me in Sydney in 1977.

"I love doing comedy. I love making people laugh and making them feel better than when they entered the theatre. In this day and age, there's so much stress and awful news and a good laugh at the theatre is really good medicine," Juliet told Active Retirees.

Hayley and Juliet last worked together on Fallen Angel 22 years ago.

"I know it’s going to be great working with Hayley again because we’re very good friends. We respect and admire each other and both have the same sense of humour. It’s going to be a wonderful experience so I look forward to it.

Despite having grown up as child celebrities, Juliet says that she and her sister both had "a very normal family life".

"We did regular family things all together and that was the most important thing. All the rest was just the icing on the cake - the wonderful job my father had which he loved, which paid well, which meant we could go to far off-places on location. We knew we were lucky," she said.

Nowadays, things are a bit different for well-known actors and actresses.

"Now there are no secrets and there’s no privacy for those people who are really in the spotlight. What a price to pay! It's a big sacrifice to not be able to go out your own front door and go down to the corner shop - all that's given up," said Juliet.

"We were never not able to go anywhere because Dad had been recognised or anything like that. If he was, somebody would just smile and be thrilled to have met him and ask for his autograph - that would be about it. There was never the kind of paparazzi that's around these days and all that."

During her career, Juliet has played a wide range of characters and while it can be difficult for older women in television to find roles to play, there are still interesting roles for her to play in theatre.

"I think there are some wonderful parts still for me to play in theatre and for women of an older age, who are often much more interesting than young women, because so much has gone on in their lives. There are some good challenging roles out there for me."