EVEN a busy film star who is up at 7am and on location until 7pm can manage to slip away for half an hour for her mum.

In 1961, still wearing her farm girl’s outfit for her role as Kathy in Whistle Down the Wind, being filmed in Pendle, Hayley Mills slipped up to the village post office at Downham to buy the biggest box of chocolates she could find for Mother’s Day.

Mum was playwright Mary Hayley Bell, who was staying in Burnley with her daughter while filming took place in various settings of East Lancashire.

Her trip to the area and meeting the local children and villagers had had some impact on Hayley, who was said to have quickly acquired a northern accent.

The young star had become firm friends with 16-year-old farmer’s daughter Christine Ashworth of Padiham, who was Hayley’s stand-in, but had also been given a small part of her own.

In those days the Downham post office was run by Mr and Mrs Thomas Pringle, who said the village had never known anything like the advent of the film unit in its history.

Said Mrs Pringle: “We have had a lot of the actors and technicians in the shop and got to know many of them.

“When the film is released, the whole village will turn out to see it; there will be coach trips to the cinema in Burnley.

“I don’t think the village has ever been so excited about anything.”

Hayley was born in 1946, the daughter of Sir John Mills and Mary Hayley Bell, and younger sister of actress Juliet Mills. She began her acting career as a child and was hailed as a promising newcomer, winning the BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer for Tiger Bay (1959), the Academy Juvenile Award for Pollyanna (1960) and Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year – Actress in 1961. During her early career, she appeared in six films for Walt Disney, and is perhaps best known for her dual role as twins Susan and Sharon in the Disney film The Parent Trap (1961).