Heather Mills

She was born on January 12, 1968, in Aldershot, Hampshire, UK, to John Francis Mills and Beatrice Mary Mills. Her father was a former paratrooper, and her mother was the daughter of a British colonel. She has an elder brother named Shane and a younger sister named Fiona.

She was raised amidst a military environment. Her father was an avid sportsman. Both her parents played musical instruments and spent quality time on family holidays. They had to move often due to the nature of her father’s work.

Heather studied at ‘Usworth Grange Primary School’ and later attended ‘Usworth Comprehensive School’ in Washington. She recalls being kidnapped and sexually assaulted by a swimming pool attendant when she was 6 years old.

Things changed for the family when her mother left her father. She was 9 years old then. The children were left with their father who had no time for them. They were ill-treated and were often short of money, due to which they had to resort to shoplifting. Her father was jailed for fraud when she was a teenager. Following this, she and her sister moved to live with their mother and her partner, actor Charles Stapley, while her brother went to live with their paternal grandparents. She once wandered away from her mother’s house to join a funfair in order to get away from the miseries of life. She attended ‘Usworth Comprehensive School’ in Tyne and Wear back then and ‘Hydeburn Comprehensive’ later.

Her father started living with a partner after he completed his jail sentence and had another daughter, Claire Mills. Heather did not do well in school and started working at a croissant shop. She was fired from her job soon. She later worked at a jewelry shop, where she was accused of stealing and was put on probation.

She met Alfie Karmal in 1986. He was 10 years older than her. He cared for her and set up a modeling agency for her called ‘ExSell Management.’ She moved to Paris on the pretext of a modeling contract and became the mistress of a Lebanese businessman named George Kazan. She was featured in a photo shoot for a German sex-education manual titled ‘Die Freuden der Liebe.’

She returned to London and got married to Karmal in May 1989. She had two ectopic pregnancies, after which she visited Croatia with his children and his ex-wife. There, she had an affair with her ski instructor, Miloš Pogačar. When the war broke out in Croatia, she set up a refugee center in London and delivered donations in Croatia.

She divorced Karmal in 1991 and later got engaged to Raffaele Mincione who worked with the ‘Industrial Bank of Japan.’ In 1993, she was hit by a police motorcycle that was responding to an emergency call. As a result, she suffered crushed ribs and a punctured lung, apart from losing her left leg six inches below the knee.

She was awarded £ 200,000 as compensation for her injury and earned another £ 180,000 from interviews with the media. She used the money to set up the ‘Heather Mills Health Trust’ that is geared toward delivering prosthetic limbs to the needy.

She herself had to have a prosthetic leg attached that had to be changed several times as her leg healed. This made her realize that there were thousands of prosthetic limbs that had been discarded by other patients and were available. She used these discarded limbs to rehabilitate citizens of Croatia who had lost their limbs to landmines.

In 1996, she was awarded the ‘Gold Award for Outstanding Achievement’ and the ‘Human Achievement Award.’

She was awarded the ‘Croatian Humanitarian Award’ in 2001 and the ‘UNESCO Children in Need Award’ in 2004.

She was named an ‘Open University Sesame Honorary Graduate’ in 2003 and an ‘Open University Doctorate’ in 2004.

She received the ‘PETA Humanitarian Award’ in 2005 and the ‘Animal Activist of the Year Award’ in 2008.

Mills won the ‘Vegan Society Achievement Award’ in 2007 and the ‘VegNews Person of the Year’ in 2009.