Hayley Mills has stolen Oscar replaced

Actor won a ‘Juvenile Oscar’ aged 14 but the half-sized statuette vanished from her house in the 80s and has never been found

Hayley Mills has been given an Oscar statuette to replace the one that went missing from her London home in the late 1980s.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Ampas), which hands out the Oscars, posted photographs on its social media feed showing Ampas president David Rubin presenting Mills with a replacement award.

Mills won the award – a half-sized statuette termed a “Juvenile Oscar” – aged 14 for her performance in the 1960 film Pollyanna, though as she was at boarding school in England she was unable to attend the ceremony and it was received on her behalf by Annette Funicello. She was the last actor to receive a Juvenile Oscar, which had been given out sporadically since 1934 with previous winners including Mickey Rooney, Shirley Temple and Judy Garland. However, Mills said that the statuette had vanished from her home in the UK while she was in the US making the Disney Channel show Good Morning, Mrs Bliss (which ran from 1988-89 and was the originator of the Saved by the Bell series).

Mills told the Hollywood Reporter in September that the statuette “was taken”. She added: “I went to America to do a television show and when I came back, it had gone. Of course, I turned the house upside down, and I asked everybody I could think of, and I did everything I could … Maybe it will turn up one day.” In 2018 she told EW that “it’s not something you can replace … They’ve broken the mould. I spoke to the Academy, and I said, ‘Well, look, give me a big one then!’ They said, ‘I’m sorry, it doesn’t work like that.’”

Mills, the daughter of established British star John Mills, had been spotted by the Walt Disney studios after her appearance alongside her father in the 1959 thriller Tiger Bay; after the success of Pollyanna, she starred in a string of Disney films including The Parent Trap and In Search of the Castaways, as well as British films such as Whistle Down the Wind and The Family Way.