The Oscar Hayley Mills first won more than sixty years ago for her performance in the Disney film Pollyanna has finally been restored to her by The Academy after it was stolen in the late ‘80s.
Mills, who was the face of a string of Disney movies like The Parent Trap in the ‘60s, was the last ever person to be given an Academy Juvenile Award. She won an award for her Pollyanna performance during the 1961 Academy Awards ceremony, but she was unable to attend at the time because she was at boarding school.
Sadly, she lost the trophy after it was reportedly stolen from her home in the ‘80s, she said in a 2018 Entertainment Weekly interview. “In the late ’80s, I came to California to do a television series,” she said. “When I came back from that first year, my little statuette had disappeared, and I never found it. And you know, 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.'”
The Academy Juvenile Award, which was a miniature-sized version of the usual Oscar statue, has only ever been given to 12 other child stars including Mills and other classic family movie child stars like Shirley Temple.
With The Academy confirming to Entertainment Weekly that they no longer have the mould for miniature awards, heartwarming photos shared by The Academy’s official Twitter show Mills being presented with a full-sized Oscar by Academy president David Rubin after visiting the Academy’s headquarters in Beverly Hills recently.
Mills isn’t the only actress going down Oscar’s memory lane recently, as Halle Berry recently opened up about the aftermath of her Monster’s Ball Oscar win in 1991.