TV Icon Donna Mills on ‘Knots Landing,’ ‘Nope,’ and Reviving Her Career at 81

In one of her favorite scenes she filmed on Knots Landing, Donna Mills recalls her character, arch-manipulator Abby, talking to the powerful Paul Galveston (Howard Duff). He patronizingly, repeatedly calls her “Cookie.”

“You may think women belong at home, barefoot and pregnant, but you’ve never dealt with me before,” Abby tells Galveston in the Season 6 scene, before getting in her car and adding the parting shot: “Oh, by the way, don’t call me Cookie.”

If Knots Landing is ever magically reborn, Mills told The Daily Beast, she “wouldn’t hesitate” to return to the role that made her world-famous in the 1980s. Abby Fairgate Cunningham Ewing Sumner Scott was the show’s glamorous queen of mean—huge of hair, capacious in cunning, and waspishly cutting to her adversaries—and Mills would relish reprising the role. “I would give anything to play her again,” Mills said. “I would do Knots Landing again in a nanosecond. Absolutely.”

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“The storyline I would love to play is Abby being homeless, then clawing her way back to the top to take over everything again,” the actor said. Would a homeless Abby keep her famously dramatic eyeshadow on point? “Oh, the eyeshadow would still be perfect,” Mills said, laughing.

But, Mills makes clear, a small but significant role in Jordan Peele’s new movie, Nope, will, she hopes, mark the beginning of a fresh chapter of her career. At 81, she is pursuing new roles with a determined zeal.

“All I dreamed about when I wanted to be a dancer as a kid was the curtain opening and someone handing me a bouquet as I took my bow,” Mills said. “I have had a wonderful career so far. I do not see myself retiring. I want to work for as long as possible.”

Knots Landing—344 episodes, made over 14 seasons between 1979 and 1993, not including later TV movies—is one of those shows much loved by its still-passionate fan base, while at the time being relatively overlooked because of the leviathan successes of Dynasty and its older sibling Dallas (from which Knots span off—even though creator David Jacobs had conceived it before Dallas, which CBS bought first).

Knots has arguably aged the best of the 1980s’ so-called supersoaps; set on a Californian suburban cul-de-sac, it somehow balanced the relatability of its setting with all the melodrama of the genre, leavened with wit and intelligence—especially evident in the crafting of Abby as not just a simple villainess but a complex Machiavelli, who memorably once dug the grave of Peter Hollister (Hunt Block) wearing a pristinely smart skirt and jacket.

“And with not one trace of dirt on it,” Mills rightly recalled.

Mills, like many actors who play such iconic characters, holds Abby dear and close, while also acknowledging the bind of playing such a role: how does one ever shrug them off professionally to convincingly play other characters? There have been countless TV shows, movies, and even a stint in General Hospital since Knots, but the specter of Abby looms large.

The first thing that is inescapably obvious when talking to Mills via Zoom is how amazing she looks. As her manager Larry Thompson says, “Somewhere there’s a portrait in the attic.” Mills says this is down to healthy living—she works out four or five times a week and plays tennis—and says the only procedures she has had done was a “bit of tucking” around 40 years ago when she first started on Knots.

She cannot say anything about Nope—indeed has signed an NDA guaranteeing her discretion—except that her role is not big and her character is not much like Abby. “I have not even seen the film yet. I will be seeing it for first time at the premiere.” Her audition was a scene from the 2013 Woody Allen movie Blue Jasmine, which she assumed must be a mistake. But no, she was told; Peele did not send actual scenes from the movie until the role has been awarded and cast.

“A couple of days later he called me on Zoom,” Mills said. “He said, ‘That was the best audition I have ever seen. You were fabulous, you nailed it. I’m going to send you the script. If you like it, the part is yours.’” Mills raised her eyebrows, and laughed. “If I liked it! He was lovely to work with, so inventive and so fun.”

Mills knows people love and remember Abby, but she also wants to move on. “I want to look to the future,” she said. “I’m not done yet.” Having taken an extended break from acting after becoming a mother at 54—her adopted daughter Chloe is now 27—Mills recently re-employed Thompson, her manager from the 1980s, and the pair are looking at scripts to kickstart Mills’ career. And, of course, there’s the tantalizing idea that Abby herself could return.

“I left the business for 18 years to raise Chloe,” Mills said. “I didn’t want to work when she was little, to be out of town for two months at a time. Once she was in school, I didn’t want to take her out of school. I wanted to be a mom and loved every minute of it. When she went off to college, I was like, ‘OK, what do I do now.’ I love interior design, and then thought, ‘Shoot, I’ll have to go to college to train for that.’ Then General Hospital called (in which Mills played Madeline Reeves from 2014-15 and 2018, winning her a Daytime Emmy), and I did a reality show (Queens of Drama, 2015) which was fun.

“The year before the pandemic I did five independent movies and two independent series, but the reason I re-hired Larry was because I wanted to bring an awareness of me back as an actor who was working again. I don’t want to stop. Not at all. I seriously love acting. I love creating a character and creating a role. Now I’m trying to get back to a ‘network’ level, whatever ‘network TV’ means these days. There are a lot of opportunities for women of my age. As Larry says, ‘We have to get you back into the conversation.’ That’s what we’re attempting to do now—so people think about me when they’re casting.”

As has been clear throughout Mills’ career, she is very much calling the shots. Don’t call her “cookie.”

“I was a bit of a tomboy”

Donna Mills was born Donna Jean Miller, and brought up with brother Donald in Norwood Park, Chicago. Her father Ambrose worked for Union Oil, her mother Bernice was a housewife who “came alive,” Mills said, when working for periods as a telephone operator—a key thing that Mills held close when building and consolidating her own fiercely prized independence.

“She had all these different companies she took messages for,” Mills said of her mom. “She did it for around five years in my early teens. She loved it. That was when she was her happiest. Then unfortunately my dad decided, ‘I’m making enough money. I don’t need you to work any more.’ He didn’t want her to work. So she didn’t. That saddened her. Work gave her a sense of independence. That impacted me greatly, because I could see such a difference in her, but I never spoke to her about it.”

Donald is 11 years older than Donna, so “was off doing his teenage things when I was a little kid. I remember my childhood as being normal—playing in the yard, playing outside, climbing trees. I was a bit of a tomboy.”

Mills went to grade school with Jim Jacobs, co-creator of Grease, who she later discovered based the character of Sandy on her. “I started going to dance class when I was 5. I loved it. I was more of an action, physical, person as a kid. I speed-skated back then. I won medals, but can’t seem to find them now. I did OK in school, but I wasn’t number one in my class or anything like that.”

Her parents were bigots, Mills said. “I have thought long and hard why their attitudes didn’t take on me or my brother, because we grew up in our household hearing everybody called everything, and anything you can think of. The only people my parents thought were OK were Swedes, Germans and Poles, and sometimes even the Poles they weren’t sure about. It was so ugly. Their vitriol, their way of looking at things, was so ugly and hurtful that it was like, ‘No, no, no. I can’t be like that.’ It made me the opposite to them. I am grateful for my parents for that. It pains me to think how bigoted they were.”

Mills went to college for a year to satisfy her parents, wanting to be a ballet dancer with the ambition to join an actual company, auditioned first for summer stock, and performed in choruses in Chicago and Milwaukee. Then, aged 19, she got a role in a touring production of My Fair Lady.

Mills grew distant from her parents, especially after her mother disowned Mills when—at college—she (a Delta Gamma) was “pinned” to a Jewish boy, which made her bigoted mother furious. Her mother died before Mills was old enough to have deeper conversations with her. “Then my father remarried the witch of the west. I didn’t like her at all. My father and I avoided subjects. We didn’t fight about it. We just didn’t talk about it.”

Mills, diametrically opposite to her parents, has always been a passionate feminist, and vocal pro-choice abortion advocate. “You know, it is just so disheartening and so shocking,” she said of the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade. “For as long as I can remember, Roe v. Wade has been on the books. Never did I think it would get overturned. It just seemed to me that was the right thing. It should just be the law. And I think now we have to fight again and get it done again, and done so it can’t be undone.

“These days there are so many things that are crumbling. It’s hard to know what to do. In my lifetime there were many causes to fight for and do stuff around. Now it’s this one, that one, democracy itself. It’s kind of overwhelming, and I think it’s overwhelming a lot of people. It’s just too much. When Obama became the first Black man to be elected president, I thought, ‘OK, this country is really great.’ Then marriage equality was sanctioned. ‘How wonderful, this is all coming together,’ I thought. But we have seen so much progress crumble in the last four years since Trump. Sometimes I just don’t know where to go with it. I have friends who have moved out of the country already.”

“The audition was in his apartment, and it was ugly”

Mills studied dance, then made her acting debut in a production of Neil Simon’s first play, Come Blow Your Horn, at Chicago’s Drury Lane Theater. “My then-dance teacher said to me. ‘You’ve got the acting bug. You’re not going to be a ballet dancer.’ I said, ‘Oh no, I’ll be a ballet dancer,’ but they were right. I also saw how short a dancer’s dancing life was, and so I veered towards acting.”

Mills came to New York, auditioning for dance and theater productions (like Woody Allen’s 1966 Broadway play, Don’t Drink the Water), appearing in commercials, and then two daytime soaps, The Secret Storm (in which she played nightclub singer Rocket) and Love Is a Many Splendored Thing (in which she played a nun called Sister Cecilia, who inevitably fell in forbidden love with a man).

“I learned a tremendous amount about the business and how to work on those shows,” Mills recalled. Making daytime soaps was very different then now, she says, with set rehearsal times and scenes filmed under far less intense time constraints. “Back then, you had time to mold a scene. That’s what acting is—finding those things to put in your performance.”

Showing her early shrewdness for negotiation, Mills and Splendored Thing co-star Leslie Charleson teamed up to ensure their contracts contained clauses that they could do guest spots on primetime shows. “The artistry of it is great, but I have always realized this was a business,” Mills said.

Another early TV role was also revolutionary, playing a lesbian in The Bold Ones: The New Doctors in 1972. The show included a same-sex kiss. “I wasn’t reticent about doing it,” Mills said. “I figured I was an actor. I could play anything. It was just another role to me, and I had grown up around gay people as a dancer, so that was not odd to me. It was the way things were. It didn’t bother me at all, and I’m glad to have been a leader in making same-sex relationships happen on screen. It didn’t get the attention that it would get today. There was no social media then. Television was so small when we think about how many channels there are now.”

As a young actor, Mills experienced sexism, and endured sexual harassment and abuse. In “1970-something” she recalled doing the pilot of a show called The Bait, in which she was cast as the lead detective. “It didn’t sell, and I remember an ABC executive saying to me, ‘It’s too bad we didn’t put your show on, but a woman just can’t carry a show.’”

In New York, she was scouted on the street one day by “minions” of satirical cartoonist Al Capp, told that he was casting for a Broadway adaptation of his famous strip, Li’l Abner.

“Al Capp was famous for getting young girls up to his apartment,” Mills told The Daily Beast. “He would send his minions out to found them. They told me I would be perfect for Daisy Mae. When I was younger people called me ‘Daisy Mae,’ so I thought it was fate and my big break. The audition was in his apartment, and it was ugly. And I went running out of there sobbing. That kind of thing happened a lot back then. There were other times when I would go to an audition, and it was like some sort of sex movie. Or you’d go to an audition, and it would be regular for a director to touch your knee, or say, ‘Well, you’ve got to do this scene naked.’

“I would say, ‘No, and if you do that again I will report you or punch you,’” Mills told The Daily Beast. “That’s how I responded and that worked. I feel like women have to be able to do that, to just say no. If you walk into a hotel room or whatever and if the situation is different to what you were expecting, turn around and walk out. I must say that once I played Abby it didn’t happen anymore. I don’t recall any sexual advances after that point. I think guys just thought ‘I’m not going to mess with her,’ because I was so identified with that powerful character.

“I learned a lot from Abby. She had a great effect on me. I think I gained confidence playing her every day. When you’re confident, you don’t put up with that stuff. It’s very gratifying for me to know that Abby seemed to have helped a lot of women. They would tell me they would watch Abby and say ‘I can be like that, I can do that.’ Abby gave them strength. It really means a lot to know something I did helped people.”

“Clint Eastwood is a lovely man, he really is”

Mills’ negotiation to star in primetime shows while in Splendored Thing was a savvy move. She guest-starred opposite Burt Reynolds in the series Dan August; so when Reynolds’ friend Clint Eastwood mentioned he was casting for the role of his character’s girlfriend in proto-Fatal Attraction movie, Play Misty for Me (1971), which he directed and starred in, Reynolds recommended Mills for the part of Tobie.

“It all happened very fast. I left Love Is a Many Splendored Thing on the Friday, met Clint for the first time on the Sunday night at the bar in the hotel we were staying in, then starting shooting on the Monday. It was a great experience. He was wonderful to work with.”

The movie is famous for Jessica Walter-as-Evelyn’s psychotic, volcanic rage, the precipitous cliffs of Monterey, Eastwood and Mills ambling through the Monterey Jazz Festival, and their love-making scene, set to Roberta Flack’s “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face.”

“That wasn’t in the script. Clint came to my trailer one day, and said he wanted to play me a song that he wanted to use in a montage. He said, ‘And there’s a place in it where we’re going to have to be naked. I plan to shoot it really nicely. When it’s done, I’ll show it to you, and if you think it’s salacious or not good I won’t put it in the movie. And of course it was beautiful. Of course, I loved it. Wasn’t that lovely of him? He was kind enough to know it would be very difficult for me. I was a little girl from a soap opera, and this was an experience of respect from a director and actor who was a big deal. He’s a lovely man, he really is.”

You could really smell the marijuana through the screen in the jazz festival scene, this reporter said.

“Oh, you could smell it in real life too,” Mills, said, laughing.

Walter herself became a friend, offering Mills her guest house to live in as Mills settled in California. “She was lovely, a really nice person,” Mills said of Walter, who died last year, aged 80.

Mills next starred in sitcom The Good Life, opposite Larry Hagman who would go on to play JR in Dallas (watch the screen crackle with delicious devilry when Abby and JR meet in Knots Landing). Scheduled opposite All in the Family, The Good Life lasted one season, “which was a bit of a blow,” said Mills. She and Hagman (who died aged 81 in 2012) became great friends, his wife Maj “taking me under their wing,’ she bringing Mills hampers of home-cooked lunch and he supplying his much-loved champagne. Mills laughed. “I had to say no to the champagne. I would be asleep by 2pm if I drank it.”

There followed TV movies of the week and thrillers. Mills said, “By the time I got Knots I was saying, ‘Oh shit, am I ever going to get something that’s going to solidify?’”

When Mills first saw the character breakdown of Abby (who first appeared in season two of Knots Landing in 1980), she told her agent, “That’s the character I want.”

“I had been playing the victim, the Miss Goody Two Shoes, the blonde Midwestern girl all my career,” Mills told The Daily Beast. “My characters were always being chased or raped. The chance to play a strong woman, and a woman who dominated, was very appealing to me. I went after it.”

“When I first came on the show they all hated me. That’s normal. (Show creator and co-executive producer) David Jacobs said to me, ‘No one is going to sit with you at lunch.’ It was only true for a while. Everybody was professional. We worked at least 12 hours a day. Everyone got along.”

“A lot of Abby was in the writing,” Mills said of the role which would win her multiple Soap Opera Digest awards. “David let the actors have a say in the characters. For years, the writers, producers, actors and directors would read through the scripts at Wednesday lunchtimes. We were allowed to say, ‘I don’t like that.’ It was a real collaboration, which I don’t think happens much in series television. Everyone was very invested in their characters. I think that’s why they worked so well. They were a bunch of talented actors, but they were living those characters. That’s why they were allowed to have that participation. It was really nice, and an extraordinary time.”

“I knew pretty much from the beginning Knots was it. I saw it had the potential to be very, very popular. It wasn’t serialized at the time, they were just individual episodes. I said to David Jacobs, ‘You have to put a hook at the end, so people come back. You can’t end the story.’ He agreed—not that he hadn’t thought of it himself. They started to serialize it, and that’s when it took off.”

Today, Mills remains close with co-stars Joan Van Ark, Michele Lee, and Ted Shackelford. Van Ark, who played Valene, Abby’s great nemesis on the show, told The Daily Beast that Jacobs had “always said Dallas was about ‘them’—the over-the-top wealthy, furs falling off arms, diamond-glistening—and Knots was about real people. I was lucky enough to do both. Anyway,” Van Ark paused and said theatrically, “we’re talking about La Mills.”

Van Ark recalled: “Donna played this character—killer gorgeous, killer manipulative, just a delicious adversary, and she was absolutely right to stand up and say Abby would never have had Val’s twins kidnapped. We knew our characters. When Donna arrived, we were already a family, and it was clear what she wanted to do with Abby. That raised the hairs on the back of my neck. I remember filming our first scene together, outside with a picnic, she nibbled away on cookies between scenes. It blew me away. She was flawless, and she could eat cookies!”

Mills recalled of the twins’ kidnapping storyline. “I said to the writers, ‘If you don’t want me on the show any more, go through with this storyline because the audience wont forgive me for this. They’ll forgive me for stealing somebody’s husband and all the machinations she did, but they won’t forgive me for this. And it’s my personal opinion she wouldn’t do that. Abby is a mother. That’s the most important thing to her. She would not do that.’” The scripts were altered.

Mills is close friends with Joan Collins, who played another 80s soap iconic villain, Alexis in Dynasty. “We would see each other at parties back then, and she would say, ‘I wish we had your writers. I love the way your show is written.’ She could see how much more depth there was it. Dynasty was great, but it was a different kind of thing. Knots had humor. We could play all versions of life—all the funny parts, all the tragic parts. That’s the reality of life David wrote, combining the worlds of glamor and suburbia.”

Mills laughed. “When Abby first moved to Knots Landing, she worked at her brother Sid’s used auto dealership. I went to David and said, ‘You have got to get Abby out of that garage.’ Who wants to come home from work and watch that? They want to see something pretty, and beautiful houses, beaches, not the inside of an ugly old garage. And he did, and got Abby involved in big business and stepped up the glamor. So you had the cul-de-sac and glamorous people too. I didn’t know Abby would become what she became. I knew she was brought in to stir the pot and be a troublemaker, but I had no idea how far that would go.”

Mills loved her male co-stars too, like Shackelford and William Devane, who played her screen husbands.

Shackelford, who played Gary Ewing—who Abby wrested away from wife Val­, much to fans’ ire—told The Daily Beast that Mills was “such a wonderful person and wonderful actress, and I was very privileged and honored to have worked with her. She is a consummate professional. Working with her was a day at the beach. You knew exactly what it was going to be when you showed up. She was clever, funny, and very concentrated. She listened closely to what you were saying, and so you listened closely to her. I really loved working with her. I am still friends with Donna, Joanie and Michele. It’s amazing we have stayed in touch all these years.”

Working with both Mills and Van Ark was “great fun,” Shackelford said. “They’re both really good actresses. Fans send old photos of us together for me to sign, and when I saw one of us recently, I didn’t know how to distinguish the three of us. We were so blonde. I was as blond as they were!”

Shackelford’s favorite set moment was playing a conversational shower scene—he inside getting wet, Mills outside—which Shackelford did naked, much to Mills’ and the crew’s surprise. “I’m not sure we could get away with that today,” he conceded.

The “amazing” Devane, Mills recalled, would “keep you on your toes” by suddenly performing a scene seated on the floor; another favorite scene of hers is when his character, Greg Sumner, tries to discover Abby without makeup, finding her in the shower—where he discovers her, naturally, perfectly made up.

Mills’ self-administered war-paint came from frustration at how she was made up, washing off what had been placed on her, then doing it herself. She would paint Abby on at home, before arriving at the studio. “I think someone who is good-looking has an advantage,” Mills said of her much-remarked-on looks. “I’m just grateful that I had some good looks that could open doors for me.”

Fans saw Abby dealing with her daughter Olivia’s (Tonya Crowe) drug addiction, comforting Val after what seemed like a suicide attempt (it wasn’t; another of the show’s then-villains had tried to make her attempted murder of Val look like suicide!), and dressing down diva-in-training Paige by informing her how averagely she rated on “the Abby scale.” There were also fun scenes, such as when mom-of-moms Karen (Michele Lee) wore a short leather skirt to a business meeting much to Abby’s amusement (“Don’t be a slave to fashion”)—many scenes now saved on the internet, prized by fans, and enjoyed by Mills.

Being recognized doesn’t happen much, but fans are “generally nice,” and during the pandemic people have recognized her with her mask on. “I know those eyes anywhere,” they say.

“The heart and soul of Donna Mills is Donna Jean Miller from Chicago,” Van Ark told The Daily Beast. “She goes into the throes of the characters she plays with everything she’s got, but the heart and soul of the mother of Chloe is the grounded person she is.”

Van Ark said she saw Mills’ “incredible heart and soul” as they worked together. “She’s a caretaker too,” said Van Ark, recalling the time that she had forgotten some lucky medals she brought to work. That day she was filming with Mills. “She could see how distraught I was, and said to me, ‘Let us be your medals today.’ It brings tears to my eyes remembering that. That’s Donna. She’s a team player for anyone.”

“I loved the multi-layers of the writing for Abby,” Mills said. “I loved the fact she never showed vulnerability except when she was alone. She had moments of real compassion, all that kind of stuff. She was human, not a caricature. A lot of people wrote to me after the drugs storyline to say it had helped them with a problem they were having with their child. That meant a lot.”

Knots Landing didn’t seem as appreciated as it should be, Mills said. “I don’t know why—maybe because it wasn’t as glitzy. Warner Brothers, who own the show today, should find a way to show it again, she thinks. She had heard there had been licensing issues around some of the music as used in the show by Lisa Hartman’s character Ciji. “That seems like a lame excuse,” said Mills. “I’m sure they could make enough money to cover the costs, or just leave those scenes out!”

“You go, ‘Shit, how much longer do I have?’”

After causing so much merry hell as Abby, Mills left Knots Landing after nine seasons (although she returned for the 1993 series finale).

“It was a big decision made for a couple of reasons. I felt the writers were running out of ideas for her, and I didn’t want to see the character go downhill. I loved the character so much and how they had written her. I felt at that point they just didn’t know what to do with her. Some writers had the mentality to think like an Abby. The writers at that time didn’t. I also felt the show was beginning to go downhill too.” She had also secured deals to make TV movies for ABC and CBS.

“It was very friendly. I went to David Jacobs and said, ‘Don’t offer me more money, because that will just make it hard for me. I don’t want more money. That’s not what this is about.’ He and I had the kind of relationship where we could be honest with each other. Most times when an actress does that they want more money. That wasn’t what it was. He said, ‘OK, I want you to know, we’ll send Abby off, but if you ever want to come back just let me know and we’ll bring you right back.”

Abby made Mills globally famous and very wealthy. Was it ever a burden in terms of finding new roles? “I think sometimes to cast me now it’s like they feel like people have such an indelible picture of me in their minds that they don’t know what I can do now. That’s what is important to me now in what I do now and next.” Playing the title role on stage in a production of Driving Miss Daisy (at The Colony Theatre in Burbank in 2017) was “really nice,” not just in terms of doing theater again after such a long time but also playing the resolutely non-glamorous title character, and hearing the emotional response of a live theater audience.

So, for her future roles will Mills lean into her Abby-ishness, or away from it? Mills laughed. “That’s funny because it’s the kind of argument Larry and I have. We just had it over the pictures to send you. He wanted pictures that show me looking older, with short hair—not glamorous, just real. But I have just done a couple of photo sessions recently that were spectacularly glamorous. We sent you one of each! I love glamor. I love bling. I just do. I always want a little sparkly on me, but I can play the other—the older woman with gray hair. God knows, I should be able to. I’m old enough! It’s just two sides of me. I’m not glamorous all the time, that’s for sure. I am probably offered more roles that are Abby-like than sweet old ladies, but I would like to play all kinds of characters.”

Of aging itself, Mills said, “I think about it all the time. I go, ‘This can’t be right.’ Maybe they forged my birth certificate or something. I don’t feel old.” Yes, she said, she does think about her mortality. “It sucks,” she said, laughing. “I want to stay here forever. I just do. But in your 70s and 80s you go, ‘Shit, how much longer do I have?’ That’s scary. So, I guess all you can do is live the fullest you can in what time you have left. I’m just grateful I have my health.” She knocks the wood of her desk. “I’m lucky.”

In her personal life, Mills has “always been very independent. I’ve never married, but love is important to me. My partner now is very important to me, to my life, to sharing.”

For many years, Mills was in a relationship with producer and singer Richard Holland; since 2001 she has been in a relationship with actor Larry Gilman. “I don’t remember anyone ever getting down on one knee,” she said when asked why has she never married. “I am so freaking independent. I just am. I’m very independent and by the time Larry and I met we were both pretty established. To combine everything at that point is really difficult. So we just combined our lives but not our finances and stuff like that. It’s much cleaner, much better.

“I love him. He’s an incredibly kind, funny, wonderful man. I’m lucky to have found him. I found him late, but I found him. Everybody loves him. He’s great. I’ve always felt a woman being independent was important. It made me feel safer, I guess, to know that I can take care of myself. I want someone to be in my life to love and be with, to be a companion and to go places and all that, but if I have to I can take care of myself.” She laughed. “And really, I had enough marriages as Abby!”

Mills adopted Chloe when she was a few days old when Mills was 54. Why did she become a parent later than convention might dictate?

“I was so obsessed by my career,” Mills told The Daily Beast. “I was so driven I didn’t really want a child during that time. I wanted to make it. My career was my focus. Then I got Knots at around 40. I knew that was the time to make my mark. I did that. At that time too I wasn’t with anybody that I guess I thought would be a great partner in having a child or children. So I just waited. I really feel that was the way it was meant to be. I was meant to find her, she was meant to find me. She’s my child, the most important person to me.”

“After Knots I kind of looked around and said, ‘Well, OK. I have achieved a certain amount of success. That’s great. I have enjoyed every moment of it, but something is missing.’ I began to be jealous whenever I would see a little kid run up and say ‘Mommy’ to their mom, and I was like…” Mills sighed. “I knew that was what was missing. My life was not going to be complete unless I had a child.

“By that time it was a little late to give birth. I always thought I would adopt at some point, so I decided that’s what I would do, and it’s one of the best things I have ever done in my life. When you talk about love there is nothing like the love you feel for a child. There just isn’t. It just opened me up so much. It made me so aware of how much you can give and experience. My life would not have been complete if I had not had her, it just wouldn’t. She’s an incredibly beautiful, talented young woman. It’s just been a joy.”

“When I was young, so impressionable, seeing my mother be happy, as a child you just want your mom to be happy,” Mills said. “That really gave me the underpinnings for my own desire for independence, and for direction and power. Women need to have power. They need to be not powerless, and need not to be overpowered. I’ve brought Chloe up similarly. I’m really proud of her. She’s smart, strong, and independent, and I hope she has seen that all through her life in me.”

Chloe has never watched Knots; indeed the only film of her mother’s she has seen was when she was 7 or 8. Mills thought it would be alright, as it was a light comedy, but in one scene Mills’ character was put in another character’s gun sights. “Chloe ran screaming from the room, and never again wanted to watch anything I was in,” Mills said. She has said, ‘That’s my mom. I can’t see her any other way.’ We’re very close.”

Larry Thompson said it was “very useful” for Mills to be able to adopt Abby’s persona when it suited her. “People perceive her as someone who you don’t want to mess with. What was so disarming is that she was a really very nice person. She’s really not Abby when it comes to her attitudes. She is strong, but in real life she uses that power in a much more likable way than Abby did. She’s been a mother for quite some time, and being a mother has softened her and brought out again the beauty and niceness of her.”

“I am living in the present, and looking to the future”

“No actor ever really retires, they just don’t get hired,” Shackelford noted wryly. This is something Mills is determined to avoid. Nope is the first staging stop in a new phase of her career. “I don’t want to be living in the past. I am living in the present, and looking to the future,” Mills told The Daily Beast. One script she has read which she would love to do focuses on a woman with dementia. “It just moves your heart, and that is the highest accolade an actor can get from an audience. My career has given me more fulfillment than I ever could have imagined.”

“Donna is not like Abby at all, apart from them both being pretty ambitious,” Shackelford said. “She’s up there in years, and still going very strong, so God bless her.”

Mills, Van Ark, and Lee appear at events and shows together. “We were friends on the show, kind of lost track a bit after, then got together afterwards,” Mills said. “I’d give parties, they’d come. It’s really nice to be in each other’s lives. They’re both crazy.” Mills laughed. “I’m the sane one of the group. And they know it, they admit it.”

Van Ark said she, Mills and Lee were “like sisters and three best friends,” who are currently planning a show called We’re Knot Done Yet, an evening of personal memories and chat they plan to tour around American cities. “We have shared weddings, funerals. We have shared lot of life, especially during that 14 years. We share a strong bond and weave,” Van Ark said.

Shackelford, like the women, is up for returning to Knots Landing too. “Sure, I can say yes to that because there’s no chance in hell that’s ever going to happen,” he said, laughing drily. “But sure, why not? Of course.”

Mills is keeping all options open, including returning to the stage and Broadway if the opportunity presents itself.

“I’d be nervous as hell and terrified, but think it would be fun. On stage you have to know the whole thing. On screen you have a couple of pages to know a day. You don’t have to learn the whole thing. And you have ‘take two.’ I think the stage is harder, in terms of energy too. You’re up there in front of an audience and you’re heightened because of that. It’s also very rewarding. To know you are affecting people, you’re touching them, is very gratifying. You don’t get that with film.”

Mills laughed when asked about her dream roles. “Probably something Meryl Streep has already done, but you don’t want to come up against Meryl Streep. She’s so unbelievably amazing. I love period drama. I did Les Liaisons Dangereuses on stage quite a long time ago (playing Madame de Merteuil, naturally, at the La Mirada Theatre in 1991). That’s a role I would love to do again. I love Downton Abbey and The Gilded Age.” (Julian Fellowes, take note.)

Thompson told The Daily Beast that he and Mills wanted to find different roles to Abby, but with the “charm Donna brings to all the role she plays. Yes, she’s talented, yes, she’s smart, yes, she’s beautiful. But throughout the years, I would always get calls from producers and directors about how nice she was to work with. That’s a quality that can be misunderstood, but is very important for a performer’s longevity.”

“In Donna’s future, I see someone who will do whatever it takes to deliver,” Van Ark said. “Donna will do things that continue to fulfill her. She may take a major leap. She’s practical. She said to me once, ‘You can’t go on playing flawless. We can’t be that forever.’ She’s right. The 80s glam-glam-glam is not where we are now. The trend now is to look real, not perfect, to scrub your face and show us who you really are.”

Thompson said, “I don’t think we should look for Donna’s future in her past. This many years later we have to do something different—maybe the soul of it is Abby, but the roles have to be the Donna Mills of today. I’ve also managed William Shatner for over 41 years, and we’ve had to change his image in various decades. He will go to his grave with people thinking of him as Captain Kirk, but he’s played many roles alongside that.”

“I think that working and being an actress is who Donna is,” Thompson said. “I think she is most alive when she’s working. Not to say she doesn’t have a life, playing tennis or having a boyfriend or having a daughter, but I think Donna Mills was born to act—and she’s just doing it longer than most. I think there will be more memorable Abby-like characters out there. There’ll be many characters like Abby Cunningham, but there’ll only be one Donna Mills.”

“More than anything right now, I would like to be an inspiration to women,” Mills told The Daily Beast. “I want to say to them, ‘In your 70s, even your 80s, it’s not over. You’ve got much more to do and much more to experience.’ That’s what I want to impart to people: ‘Wow, if she can do it, I can do it.’ That would be very fulfilling for me.”