62 Facts About Heather Mills

1.

Heather Anne Mills was born on 12 January 1968 and is an English former model, businesswoman and activist.

2.

Heather Mills began a relationship with Paul McCartney in 2000.

3.

Heather Mills 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.

4.

The Heather Mills family spent their holidays in Libanus, and lived there for a time.

5.

When Heather Mills 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.

6.

Heather Mills attended Usworth Grange Primary school, and then Usworth Comprehensive School in Washington.

7.

Heather Mills visited Usworth Comprehensive in 2003, as guest of honour at a prize-giving event, and to support the school against plans for its closure.

8.

Beatrice left home when Heather Mills 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.

9.

Heather Mills 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.

10.

When Heather Mills'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.

11.

Heather Mills 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.

12.

Heather Mills 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.

13.

Heather Mills worked for a croissant shop, but was sacked, and vowed "never to work for anyone else again".

14.

Heather Mills 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.

15.

Heather Mills admitted she had a problem and said it was because she'd been forced to lie as a child by her father.

16.

Heather Mills set up a refugee crisis centre in London, helping over 20 people to escape the war.

17.

Heather Mills suffered crushed ribs, a punctured lung, and the loss of her left leg 6 inches below the knee; a metal plate was later attached to her pelvis.

18.

Heather Mills 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.

19.

Heather 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.

20.

Heather 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.

21.

The first convoy of limbs arrived in Zagreb in October 1994, and Heather Mills travelled with the convoy to film interviews with some of the recipients for the daytime television programme Good Morning with Anne and Nick.

22.

Heather Mills received an award in 2001 from Croatia's prime minister, Ivica Racan for the money she raised to help clear that country of landmines.

23.

In 1995, Heather Mills became engaged to British media executive Marcus Stapleton, after being together for 16 days; and was then engaged to documentary filmmaker Chris Terrill in 1999, after 12 days in Cambodia, where they were making a film about landmines.

24.

Heather 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.

25.

Heather Mills 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.

26.

Heather Mills is a former Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Association Adopt-A-Minefield programme.

27.

Heather Mills met McCartney at the Dorchester Hotel, during the Pride of Britain Awards event on 20 May 1999, which McCartney had attended to present an award to an animal rights activist.

28.

Heather Mills said that she liked to cook traditional vegetarian Christmas dinners for McCartney and as many of his family as possible, and that McCartney had encouraged her to give up her self-confessed addiction to chocolate and Snickers bars.

29.

McCartney later said that Heather Mills's contribution was giving him an acrylic fingernail to protect a finger on his left hand that often bled after playing guitar.

30.

Heather Mills gave birth to Beatrice Milly McCartney on 28 October 2003 at Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth in St John's Wood, who was named after Heather Mills' mother and McCartney's aunt.

31.

Heather Mills was invited by Larry King to interview Paul Newman, which was broadcast by CNN on 17 April 2004.

32.

In November 2007, Heather Mills gave a number of interviews, saying that the breakdown of the marriage was caused by her husband's daughter, Stella, whom she described as "jealous" and "evil".

33.

Heather Mills had previously talked with New York magazine, saying Stella had once issued a press release confirming how much she liked her new stepmother, although Stella's publicist denied that such a statement had ever been issued.

34.

In leaked documents, Heather Mills complained that McCartney was often drunk, smoked cannabis, stabbed her with a broken wine glass, pushed her over a table, and pushed her into a bathtub when she was pregnant.

35.

Heather Mills expressed himself moderately though at times with justifiable irritation, if not anger.

36.

Heather Mills rejected her argument that she had rekindled McCartney's "professional flame" after he had lost his first wife, Linda, to cancer.

37.

Heather Mills encouraged it and lent his support, name and reputation to her business and charitable activities.

38.

Heather Mills frequently accused the press of misquoting her and of using material out of context to give a negative impression of her, telling the Evening Standard that the claims that she had married McCartney for his money were more hurtful than losing her leg.

39.

Heather Mills has been accused by several newspapers of having embellished her life story.

40.

Stapley said that Heather Mills's mother had suffered a leg injury after a car crash, but recovered and was "a keen tennis player" and that Heather Mills "is simply a very confused woman for whom reality and fantasy have become blurred".

41.

Heather Mills said that she had once been asked to stand for parliament by the three main political parties, and had been offered a peerage in 2001 by the then British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and a certain 'Lord MacDonald'.

42.

British journalist Jasper Gerard, to whom Heather Mills made the claims, says she told him that she had cancelled a meeting with US president Bill Clinton in case her endorsement affected a US election outcome.

43.

Heather Mills stated that she was once awarded the title of Outstanding Young Person of the Year by the British Chambers of Commerce, but did not challenge newspapers after they discovered there was no such award.

44.

In October 2006, Heather Mills announced her intention to sue the Daily Mail, The Sun and the Evening Standard newspapers.

45.

Heather Mills has complained that over 4,400 abusive articles about her have been published.

46.

Heather Mills behaved foolishly when the marriage failed, but she does not deserve the treatment she has had in the mass-market press.

47.

The Daily Mirror ran the headline "Macca marriage to Heather Mills was mistake of the decade", following an interview that McCartney gave to Q magazine.

48.

On 5 May 2011, The Guardian reported that Heather Mills had met with officers from the London Metropolitan Police who showed her evidence, seized from private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, which could form the basis of a claim against the News of The World for breach of privacy over alleged phone-hacking.

49.

Heather Mills later alleged that a journalist working for the Mirror Group had admitted to her in 2001 that he had hacked her phone.

50.

Heather Mills told the inquiry that Morgan was "a man that has written nothing but awful things about me for years and would have relished telling the inquiry if I had played a personal voicemail message to him".

51.

In March 2006, McCartney and Heather Mills travelled to Canada to bring attention to the country's annual seal hunt.

52.

McCartney and Heather Mills protested against seals being clubbed to death, pierced with boat hooks and sometimes skinned alive.

53.

In 2008, an old video surfaced of Heather Mills wearing a mink coat that she had owned in 1989, but explained to reporters that she had bought it years before becoming involved in animal rights organisations or vegetarianism.

54.

In June 2008, Heather Mills was asked to talk at a New York party about the cruelty of puppy farms and to promote her book about animals, but was angry about the guests talking during her speech, saying: 'Listen up at the back.

55.

On 4 July 2009, Heather Mills opened a vegan restaurant called VBites at Hove Lagoon, East Sussex.

56.

Heather Mills was quoted as saying that she intended it to be the first in a worldwide chain of vegan restaurants.

57.

Heather Mills opened a new, enlarged VBites in East Street in Brighton which closed in September 2017.

58.

Also in 2009, Heather Mills bought the vegan food company Redwood Foods, which she would rename to VBites Foods.

59.

In 2019, Heather Mills launched a 55-acre site in Northumberland providing manufacturing, storage and business space exclusively to vegan enterprises.

60.

Heather Mills was one of the celebrity performers competing on the US television series Dancing with the Stars in 2007, with dancing partner Jonathan Roberts.

61.

Heather Mills was part of a series of body cast sculptures by the contemporary British sculptor Louise Giblin in 2012.

62.

Heather Mills was barred from competition due to fallout and complaints about her behaviour towards officials.