Gillian Hills

Gillian Hills (born 5 June 1944 in Cairo, Kingdom of Egypt) is a British actress, singer and later book‑illustrator whose career spanned the vibrant cultures of post‑war Europe and the swinging sixties. The daughter of the explorer Denis Hills and the Polish‑heritage writer Wanda Leśmianówna, she spent her childhood in Nice where she was discovered at fourteen by director Roger Vadim, who cast her in a French adaptation of Les Liaisons dangereuses (1959). The following year she landed the lead role in the British teen film Beat Girl, a landmark picture noted for John Barry’s first film score and for launching the pop‑culture career of Adam Faith. Throughout the early 1960s she balanced a burgeoning singing career with appearances in French cinema, recording hit yé‑yé singles such as “Zou bisou bisou,” “Ma première cigarette,” and the Serge Gainsbourg duet “Une petite tasse d’anxiété.” Her voice echoed across the French pop charts, and her songs later re‑emerged in contemporary series like Mad Men and The Queen’s Gambit, attesting to her lasting influence. By the mid‑1960s Hills returned to the English‑language screen, delivering a memorable performance as the Brunette in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (1966), a film that won the Grand Prix at Cannes. She continued to work with celebrated directors, appearing in John Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence (1968), James Salter’s Three (1969), and Stanley Kubrick’s cult classic A Clockwork Orange (1971), where she played one of Alex’s record‑shop companions. She replaced Marianne Faithfull in Hammer’s horror Demons of the Mind (1972) before retiring from film, moving to New York and reinventing herself as a book‑and‑magazine illustrator, designing covers for authors such as Alice Munro and Alice Walker. Today she divides her time between Britain and the United States, living with her husband Stewart Young, a veteran music manager. Her multifaceted career—spanning film, music, and visual arts—remains a testament to the artistic fluidity of the 1960s generation.