Bell, Mary Hayley

▪ 2006

      British playwright, novelist, and actress (b. Jan. 22, 1911, Shanghai, China—d. Dec. 1, 2005, Denham, Buckinghamshire, Eng.), turned her back on a promising stage career in the early 1940s following her marriage to actor Sir John Mills (Mills, Sir John ) (q.v.) and instead began writing plays, notably Men in Shadow (1942) and Duet for Two Hands (1945), both of which starred her husband. She achieved her greatest renown, however, for her novel Whistle Down the Wind (1958). Its film adaptation (1961) starred her daughter Hayley Mills, and in the 1990s Andrew Lloyd Webber made it into a stage musical.

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