Heather Mills: The Real Mrs McCartney

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Friends, family and a former husband cast a dubious eye over Mills' much publicised rags to riches tale. Charitable Lady Bountiful? Or media savvy gold digger?

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Heather Mills
born: 01-12-1968
birth place: Tyne and Wear, England

Heather Ann Mills was born in 1968 to John Mark Francis Mills, a former British soldier, and his wife Beatrice Mary Finlay. The family moved from Washington in Tyne & Wear to County Durham when she was a toddler.

John Mills’ relationship with Beatrice was characterised by violence and Mills’ mother eventually moved out when Heather was nine, leaving her and her siblings in the care of their father. Aged 13, Mills ran away from home after she suffered abuse by him and he also became imprisoned for fraud.

However, as is often the case with headstrong teenagers, Mills didn’t see eye to eye with her mother’s boyfriend and she soon found herself living homeless under the arches at London Waterloo. Fortunately she managed to reconcile with Beatrice before she died of a blood clot in her lungs after minor surgery in 1989.

In May 1989, Mills married Alfie Karmal who encouraged her aspirations to be a model. When she turned 20, Mills had taken part in a dubious photo shoot with a male model in which she had to stimulate sex acts. The subsequent photos were published in a book called The Joys of Love and would come back to haunt her years later as her publicity trail unraveled. Within two years of marriage to Karmal, the relationship had foundered and the pair divorced in 1991.

In 1990, after suffering an ectopic pregnancy, Mills temporarily moved to Slovenia to recover. When she arrived there she witnessed the outbreak of civil war and it had such an impact on her that she spent the next couple of years helping to set up a refugee crisis centre, funded by her modelling. The Heather Mills Trust was also created to raise money for young disabled victims of the war.

Mills’ life took a dramatic unexpected turn in August 1993 when she was hit by a police motorcycle while crossing the road near Kensington Palace. In the accident her ribs were crushed, lung punctured and her left leg injured so badly that it was amputated below the knee. Realising her modelling career was over; Mills summoned the press to her hospital room and sold her story.

Adjusting to an amputation is of course a major step for anyone but Mills was not going to settle for any old artificial limb. Due to the nature of her injury, or the ‘stump’ as she refers to it, her prosthetic leg had to be constantly replaced while the redundant leg was just discarded. Mills realised that the discarded artificial limb would then go un-used and the same could probably be said for thousands of others. Taking her cue from her experiences in Balkans, Mills arranged for the prostheses to be sent to the country to aid victims of the war and land-mine explosions.

In 1999 Mills met Sir Paul McCartney at a charity event and after sparking up a friendship, he lent his backing vocals to a single she was recording in aid of raising money for the Heather Mills Trust. Rumours of their relationship being more than just friends soon began to circulate in the media, with McCartney’s publicists initially vehemently denying the claims, most probably in light of the fact he had lost his wife of 29 years, Linda, to breast cancer only 19 months earlier.

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Links relating to this biography:
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