Donna Mills Calls Adopting Daughter ‘My Greatest Joy’

Donna Mills Calls Adopting Daughter ‘My Greatest Joy’

By Movieguide® Contributor

KNOTS LANDING actress Donna Mills reflected on her career, her newest show and what she calls the “best moment” of her life in a recent CBS interview.

From starring in Clint Eastwood’s PLAY MISTY FOR ME in 1971 to her role in KNOTS LANDING, Mills has made her mark on screen.

Her most recent casting is in the Lifetime series V.C. ANDREWS’: DAWN, where she plays a mean grandmother who she describes as “probably the evilest I’ve ever been.”

But despite her successful career, Mills felt that something was missing.

“I had had a hit series, I had my own production company, I was doing all this stuff, and I said to myself, ‘Well, this is great. I’ve achieved almost everything that I’ve wanted to in my career. What about my life? How does that look to me? Do I want to go through life without knowing what it’s like to be a mother, which is the most important thing in the world?” she asked herself.

“No. I want that in my life.’ And by that time, it was kind of past the time when I was going to be able to have a baby. So, I thought, I’ll adopt. And that’s probably what I feel is my greatest joy,” Mills explained. 

At the age of 54, Mills adopted her daughter Chloe in 1994. 

Mills describes the moment she met Chloe as “probably the best moment of my entire life, when she was put in my arms. She was four days old. And there she was. Those are my happiest times in my life, sitting in the rocking chair with her on my chest, singing to her.”

Movieguide® previously reported on Mills: 

KNOTS LANDING star Donna Mills quit acting in her 50s to focus her life on motherhood and raising her adopted daughter.

“That yearning was there. The yearning grew bigger as I got older…I knew my life wasn’t going to be complete…As wonderful as my career was, as wonderful as my life was, there was a big hole,” Mills told Tamron Hall about her desire for motherhood…

“I was so driven in my career, so it’s one of the reasons I waited. I didn’t want to resent the time that I would have to give,” Mills explains her decision to wait to start her family.

She eventually adopted her daughter Chloe, but she stepped away from a highly successful acting career that she might have never returned to. For Mills, though, “I didn’t worry about it because I wanted so much to be a mom.”


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