Gillian Hills (born 5 June 1944) is a British actress and singer. She first came to notice as a teenager in the 1960s in the British films Beat Girl (1960) and Blowup (1966). She also spent several years living in France, where she embarked on a singing career as well as starring in a number of French films.
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Career
Born in Cairo, Kingdom of Egypt, Hills is the daughter of teacher, traveller, author, and adventurer Denis Hills. Her mother was Wanda "Dunia" Leśmianówna, daughter of Polish-Jewish poet Bolesław Leśmian. She spent her early years in Nice (France), where she was discovered at 14 by Roger Vadim, the director of And God Created Woman and Barbarella, who saw her as the next Brigitte Bardot and cast her in a version of Les Liaisons dangereuses (1959).
At 15, Hills was cast in the lead for the British film Beat Girl, made in 1959 and released in 1960. This was John Barry's first film score. Her co-star was a young Adam Faith in his first film role. The British Board of Film Censors ordered cuts to be made before they would give it an X certificate. In 2016, the British Film Institute remastered Beat Girl from the original negative and recorded an interview with Hills for the DVD release.
