Growing up, Donna Mills lived in Norwood Park, a quiet working-class area of Chicago where everyone seemed to know each other’s personal information. Her mother stayed at home, her father was a computer analyst for an oil company, and her older brother, Donald, was ten years her senior. To be honest, the picture is rather unremarkable; it gives no indication of her future.
Before attending Taft High School, she went to Garvy Elementary School. There is a detail about that period of her life that is easy to ignore but worth pausing to consider. Jim Jacobs, who later co-wrote the musical Grease and allegedly drew inspiration for Sandy from her, was one of her Taft classmates. Finding out that a portion of someone was immortalized in a film they had nothing to do with is an odd experience. It’s the kind of coincidence that sticks with you once you realize it, even though Mills herself doesn’t seem to have made much of it in public.
She enrolled at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign after high school, joined the sorority Delta Gamma, and adapted to campus life as most students do. However, she was only around for a year. She was drawn away from the lecture halls and toward the stage by something, so she decided to pursue acting and dancing instead, gaining experience in Chicago’s summer stock productions. It is important to note that this was not a dramatic, rebellious departure. It reads more like a subdued rerouting, a young woman discovering, at a relatively young age, what she truly wanted to do with her life.
Her first significant acting role was in a Drury Lane Theater production of Come Blow Your Horn. After that, she was cast in a touring production of My Fair Lady, which eventually brought her to New York City. She worked as a secretary at Popular Mechanics magazine to make ends meet before any TV roles came her way. That detail has an almost endearing quality. Answering phones at a magazine about engines and gadgets, a future soap opera icon, with no real assurance that any of it would lead anywhere.
Of course it did. Mills’ tenure as Abby Cunningham on Knots Landing, which earned her three Soap Opera Digest Awards for Outstanding Villainess, served as the cornerstone of her nearly sixty-year career. Since then, she has kept up her steady work, appearing in projects like Nope and Origin decades into a career that began with a single semester of college and a choice to wager on something less certain.
It’s difficult to ignore how little formal education—at least in the conventional sense—actually influenced her path. Many actors rely on conservatory training or drama programs to get their start. Instead of earning a degree, Mills appears to have learned primarily by doing. She later took acting lessons from coach Wynn Handman and developed real skill through dance training and stage work. In one version of this tale, the one year at Illinois that was left unfinished appears to be a loose end. Instead, it appears that her career began when she realized that school wasn’t where her education would truly take place.
