Oct 22, 2013
Biography[edit]
Wills' parents, Alaric and Anna Willys planned to buy a house in the South of France but their plan was ended by the outbreak of World War II. Alaric Wills's gambling debts forced his wife to find work while he became a captain in the British Army and an absent figure. Anna was occupied as a companion to a blind aristocrat, gardener, teacher - moving Anneke and her brother Robin around the country.[citation needed]
Career[edit]
Wills gained her first role at the age of 11 while she was living on a houseboat in Bray,Berkshire. The film was called Child's Play and she gave the £9 fee to her mother. Deciding she wanted to be an actress she then studied drama at the Arts Educational School and RADA in London and quickly became one of the busiest actresses of her generation, early roles included an appearance as Roberta in the second TV version of The Railway Children in 1957.
At 17 she began a relationship with Anthony Newley while working on the TV series The Strange World of Gurney Slade. Newley fathered Wills' first child, but left her to marry Joan Collins.[1] During the 1960s Wills spent much of her time at the famous Troubadour Coffee Shop and the Establishment, and was part of the so-called Chelsea Set, counting among her close friends Peter Cook andDudley Moore, the Alberts, Sammy Davis Junior, Angela Douglas and Kenneth More, Mary Quant and Sarah Miles among others.
Wills married actor Michael Gough in 1962, but Gough's infidelity and possessive nature led to the end of their marriage and the couple divorced in 1979. In 1966 she took the role of Polly in Doctor Who and appeared in the show into 1967 alongside William Hartnell and then Patrick Troughton. Other television credits include appearances in The Avengers and as Evelyn in Strange Report (1969–70). She left the latter series when it was planned to switch filming to Hollywood.
Personal life[edit]
In 1970, Wills gave up acting and moved to Norfolk, throwing herself into motherhood and gardening. During this time she travelled toVietnam and Laos and spent time at Poona, India at the ashram of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Known then as Ma Prem Anita, she visited the ashram many times in the 1970s and early 1980s, accompanied by her son Jasper (Swami Dhyan Yogi).
She has remarried twice and lived in California and in an artists' colony on Hornby Island in Canada, returning to the UK in the mid-1990s. She is still involved in the worlds of Doctor Who, being a popular guest at conventions and being employed by the BBC and Big Finish to record various Doctor Who related audio and DVD projects.
The first volume of her autobiography, Self Portrait, was published in 2007 by Hirst Books, and a second volume, Naked, followed in 2009.
Wills's latest book Anneke Wills - In Focus, was published in May 2012 by Fantom Films, an updated paperback version will be released in 2014.
In October 2013 she recorded an abridged version of Who's There? the biography of William Hartnell, written by his granddaughter, Jessica Carney.