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Hayley Mills on her issue with 'That Darn Cat!': 'I don't like looking at myself on the screen when I'm really fat'

That darn... fat?

Though it remains a Disney favorite more than 55 years after its release and spawned a 1997 remake starring Christina Ricci and Doug E. Doug, That Darn Cat! is less popular with its star, Hayley Mills. The English actress was 19 when she starred opposite Dean Jones in the thriller comedy, the last of her six films produced by Disney during the 1960s.

Hayley Mills on the set of That Darn Cat!, directed by Robert Stevenson. (Photo: Walt Disney Productions/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)
Hayley Mills on the set of That Darn Cat!, directed by Robert Stevenson. (Photo: Walt Disney Productions/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)

Now 75 and promoting her new memoir Forever Young, Mills has shared that she finds it hard to watch the Robert Stevenson-directed film because of her appearance.

"Well, it's a very amusing film," the Disney Legend told co-host Louis Virtel during an appearance on the podcast Keep It this week. "I enjoyed that; it's very funny. The only thing is...

"My vanity is still a problem. I don't like looking at myself on the screen when I'm really fat, and I was really fat in that film," she laughed. "Whatever I did, my face was like a balloon."

Mills added that she has a "soft spot" for her first two Disney films, undeniably her most popular: 1960's Pollyanna and 1961's The Parent Trap.

"They were the best two films I made for Disney," she told Virtel, crediting David Swift, who wrote and directed both movies. "Those two, I think they do stand out, whereas I'm not quite so sure about some of the others."

Mills also spoke about her marriage, at age 25, to the much older filmmaker Roy Boulting. She recalled bristling when people suggested that the 50-something Boulting was a "father substitute," to which the daughter of Oscar winner and fellow Disney Legend Sir John Mills would retort, "I've got a perfectly good father of my own, thank you very much, I don't need another one."

Of the late Boulting, to whom she was married from 1971 to 1977, she said, "Although he was a lot older — 32 years, to be precise — he didn't look it, and he didn't seem like it. He was very young, spiritually."