Heather Mills
Heather Anne Mills is an English former model, businesswoman and animal rights activist.
Mills came to public attention in 1993 when she was a model and was run over by a police motorcycle in London. The accident resulted in the amputation of her left leg below the knee, but she continued to model using a prosthetic limb and later sold her story to the tabloid journal News of the World.
She began a relationship with Paul McCartney in 2000. They married in June 2002 and Mills gave birth to Beatrice Milly McCartney on 28 October 2003. They separated in 2006, and finalised their divorce in 2008.
After her marriage to McCartney, Mills became involved in animal rights advocacy and as of 2024 is a patron of Viva! and Viva! Health. She is also vice-president of the Limbless Association.
Early life
Mills was born in Aldershot, Hampshire, to John 'Mark' Francis Mills, a former British paratrooper, and his wife, Beatrice Mary Mills, who was the daughter of a colonel in the British Army. John was adopted at the age of seven and grew up in Brighton, where his adoptive parents had a grocery shop. His adoptive father also worked as a mechanic for a Grand Prix racing team. Beatrice was born in India during World War II, and was educated at English boarding schools. John and Beatrice met at Newcastle University, and were married against the wishes of her father, who did not attend the wedding and saw his daughter only once more before he died.Beatrice spoke several languages and played the piano, while Mark played banjo and guitar, liked photography and took part in numerous sports. He was very fond of animals, and Heather remembered her family always having a dog and a cat, as well as once having a pet goose and a white nanny goat that was allowed to roam the house owned by Mark's parents in Libanus, near Brecon.
The Mills family spent their holidays in Libanus, and also lived there for a time. When Heather was six years old, the family moved north to Alnwick, in Northumberland, but relocated shortly afterwards to a block of flats in Washington, Tyne and Wear, and then on to Cockshott Farm, in Rothbury, Northumberland. Heather attended Usworth Grange Primary school, and then Usworth Comprehensive School in Washington. She visited Usworth Comprehensive in 2003, as guest of honour at a prize-giving event, and to support the school against plans for its closure.
Heather later wrote that, when she was eight years old, she and her next-door neighbour were kidnapped and sexually assaulted by a swimming pool attendant. But her neighbour, Margaret Ambler, alleged that Heather's story was "nothing what she made it out to be", that Heather was never a victim, and the pool attendant did not commit suicide, as she had written. Although having received a letter from Heather offering £10,000 to stop a court case, Ambler complained that the story had caused her deep discomfort by bringing the incident to national attention, so she sued for breach of privacy, accepting an out-of-court settlement of £5,000 in compensation and £54,000 legal costs.
Beatrice left home when Heather was nine years old, to live with Crossroads actor Charles Stapley, which left her, her older brother Shane, and her younger sister Fiona, in the care of their father John. Heather once said that John threw Shane against a window for making a mess on the carpet with crayons; the window broke and Shane had to be taken to hospital, where John explained that the boy had fallen on some glass in the garden. Fiona said: "Our family were always short of money and our father demanded that we find food and clothes so we turned to shoplifting, learnt to hide from the bailiffs and became experts at domestic duties. I'm not ashamed to say that we were forced to steal because when you are a young child, you'd rather do that than face a beating from your father." John disputed his daughters' allegations that he was violent towards them, later releasing home movies of family holidays in Wales, showing Mills playing happily.
London and modelling
When Heather's father was jailed for 18 months after being convicted of fraud, she left home with her sister Fiona to live with their mother and her partner in Clapham, south London. Shane went to Brighton to live with his paternal grandparents. Heather later wrote that at the age of 15, she ran away to join a funfair, and lived in a cardboard box under Waterloo station for four months, although Stapley denied this by saying that she occasionally left home at weekends to travel with a young man who worked for a funfair in London. During Heather's stated period of homelessness, her school records indicated that she and Fiona were both enrolled at Usworth comprehensive in Tyne and Wear until April 1983, and at Hydeburn Comprehensive, in Balham, on 6 June that year, where they both stayed until 2 July 1984. Heather remembered that a teacher at the Hydeburn once said, "there's no hope for her at all", and that she left school with no academic qualifications. In the same year, her father had another daughter, Claire Mills, with a new partner.Mills worked for a croissant shop, but was sacked, and vowed "never to work for anyone else again". She wrote in her 1995 autobiography that the owner of a jewellery shop in Clapham gave her a job on Saturdays, but Jim Guy, the owner of Penrose Jewellers, later stated: "Everything she wrote about me was lies, I never gave her a job; she just hung around and made tea. She told me her father was dead. The only thing that was true was she nicked stuff from the shop," which Guy said was worth £20,000. Heather admitted that she had stolen some gold chains and sold them to buy a moped, and when Guy reported the theft, she was put on probation.
Alfie Karmal, the son of a Palestinian father and Greek mother, was ten years older than Mills when they met in 1986. Karmal bought her new clothes and Cartier jewellery, and paid for cosmetic surgery to her breasts. Karmal, who had moved into the computer industry, set up a model agency for her, ExSell Management, although it was unsuccessful. In 1987, Mills went to live in Paris, telling Karmal that a cosmetics company had given her a modelling contract, but instead she became the mistress of millionaire Lebanese businessman George Kazan for two years and took part in a nude photo session for a stills-only German sex education manual called Die Freuden der Liebe.
After returning to London, Mills asked Karmal to marry her. Karmal said yes, but on one condition: "I told her I couldn't marry her until she did something about her compulsive lying, and she agreed to see a psychiatrist for eight weeks. She admitted she had a problem and said it was because she'd been forced to lie as a child by her father." Although Mills proposed to Karmal, she later said that every man she has been out with "has asked me to marry him within a week". The couple married on 6 May 1989. While married to Karmal, she suffered two ectopic pregnancies, so in 1990, Karmal paid for her to go on holiday to Croatia with his children and ex-wife, but Mills ended up living with her Slovenian ski instructor, Miloš Pogačar, shortly before the Croatian War began. Mills set up a refugee crisis centre in London, helping over 20 people to escape the war. She drove to deliver donations to Croatia, taking modelling assignments in Austria on the way to pay for the trip, later saying that she "worked on the front line in a war zone in the former Yugoslavia for two years where there were mines everywhere that weren't marked." Karmal and Mills were divorced in 1991, and Mills was engaged to Raffaele Mincione in 1993.
Accident and amputation
On 8 August 1993, Mills and Mincione walked to the corner of De Vere Gardens and Kensington Road, London, but while crossing Kensington Road, Mills was knocked down by a police motorcycle, the last in a convoy of three, which was responding to an emergency call. Mills suffered crushed ribs, a punctured lung, and the loss of her left leg below the knee; a metal plate was later attached to her pelvis. In October 1993, she had another operation that further shortened her leg. Mills was awarded £200,000 by the police authority as recompense for her injuries, even though the police motorcyclist was later cleared by magistrates of driving without due care and attention. After the accident, Mills sold her story to the News of the World, and gave other interviews, saying she earned £180,000. She used the money to set up the Heather Mills Health Trust, which existed from 2000 to 2004 and delivered prosthetic limbs to people who had lost limbs after stepping on landmines. Mills often showed people her prosthetic leg, once taking it off during an interview on the American talk show Larry King Live, in 2002.Mills booked herself into the Hippocrates Health Institute in Florida, which put her on a raw food vegan diet, using wheat grass and garlic poultices to heal her wound. After an operation, Mills discovered that she had been previously identified as having an O rhesus negative blood type, when in fact she was A rhesus negative, which had interfered with her attempts to follow the so-called blood type diet. As her prosthetic leg had to be replaced on a regular basis, and because the size of the amputated stump kept changing as it healed, she had the idea to collect thousands of discarded prosthetic limbs for amputees in Croatia. Mills persuaded the Brixton prison governor to get inmates to dismantle and pack the prosthetic limbs before being transported, which resulted in 22,000 amputees obtaining limbs in addition to the Croatian citizens who were already supplied with prosthetic limbs by the Croatian Institute for Health Insurance, which paid for the fitting of limbs and rehabilitation of patients. The first convoy of limbs arrived in Zagreb in October 1994, and Mills travelled with the convoy to film interviews with some of the recipients for the daytime television programme Good Morning with Anne and Nick. She received an award in 2001 from Croatia's prime minister, Ivica Račan for the money she raised to help clear that country of landmines.
With the help of ghostwriter Pamela Cockerill, Mills wrote a book about her experience, entitled Out on a Limb, which was republished in the United States as A Single Step. Extracts from Out on a Limb were serialised in the Daily Mail in March 2000. Mills handed all the proceeds from the book to Adopt-A-Minefield, and stated that it was one of 'the few charities where 100% of their donations goes to clear minefields and survivor assistance'. In 1995, Mills became engaged to British media executive Marcus Stapleton after being together for 16 days; she was then engaged to documentary filmmaker Chris Terrill in 1999, after 12 days in Cambodia, where they were making a film about landmines. Mills ended their relationship five days before their planned wedding day, later telling friends in the media that she had called the wedding off because Terrill was gay, an MI6 agent, and that his mission was to sabotage her anti-landmine work. Terrill had once told Mills that he had been interviewed by the intelligence services when he was thinking of a career with the Foreign Office, but later said: "I soon realised that Heather had a somewhat elastic relationship with the truth, which she was able to stretch impressively sometimes." Terrill also claims that although Mills said she was a vegetarian at the time, she often cooked her speciality dish, Lancashire hotpot, for him; her former sister-in-law, Dianna Karmal, claims that Mills became a vegetarian after meeting McCartney.
In 2003, the Open University awarded Mills an honorary doctorate for her philanthropic work on behalf of amputees. She continues to campaign, in addition to promoting the distribution of prostheses around the world, and has been involved with the development of the Heather Mills McCartney Cosmesis, which gives amputees in America the chance to wear a Dorset Orthopaedic cosmesis without having to travel to the UK. Mills is also vice-president of the Limbless Association. In 2004, Mills received a "Children in Need" award from the annual International Charity Gala in Düsseldorf; in the same year, the University of California, Irvine gave her their 2004 Human Security Award and created the Heather Mills McCartney Fellowship in Human Security to support graduate students conducting research on pressing human security issues. She is a former Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Association Adopt-A-Minefield programme.