A True Poly-Anna

The actor playing Anna in “The King and I” need not be a singer. Consider Gertrude Lawrence, who originated the role in 1951 on Broadway. She was not much of a singer.

Nor was Deborah Kerr, whose songs in the 1956 film version of the Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein musical were dubbed by Marni Nixon.

In fact, the show is famous for making a star out of that least of singers, Yul Brynner, who not only originated the role of the King of Siam but seemed to make it his life’s work.

Even so, Hayley Mills, currently making her American theatrical debut as Anna in the national touring production of “The King and I,” decided to brush up her singing just to be on the safe side.

“I wouldn’t have the temerity to step on the boards without some very, very serious voice coaching,” she said the other day from Salt Lake City, the show’s most recent stop before opening Tuesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

“I’ve taken voice lessons for years,” the 51-year-old British star added, “but I took them really intensely before I went on tour.”

She has nothing but “heartfelt gratitude” for the operatically trained performers in this production--notably Helen Yu as Lady Thiang, who has the big arias--because they’re more than able to pick up any vocal slack.

“The focus for me really--since I’m not a singer--is what the song is about,” Mills pointed out. “It’s an enormous challenge to find the best way as an actress to interpret it. And that’s what I do: I interpret.”

Mills, who is best known in this country for her teenage roles in such 1960s movies as “Pollyana,” “The Parent Trap” and “The Moonspinners,” compares her singing style to Rex Harrison’s--but, she has quipped, “in drag.”

She played Anna for the first time in 1991 on a yearlong tour of Australia. That lavish production, more or less identical to this one in its opulent physical design, led to the triumphant revival mounted last year on Broadway, where it is still running, having earned four 1996 Tony Awards (including best musical revival).

Donna Murphy opened on Broadway as Anna (also winning a Tony), followed by Faith Prince and others. Mills went on the road with the show’s national company in April, and has four more months to go.

“There’s talk of taking the show to Japan afterward, but I won’t be going,” Mills said. “I’ll be in a stretcher by then. I have to say that American theater folk work harder than anybody I’ve ever met in my life.”

The tour sometimes goes for two weeks at a stretch without a day off because “the so-called rest day is a travel day,” she said. “I don’t know how people survive such long, long periods without a break. It’s rather daunting. And it’s a huge, huge production. We have 75 people on the road with us. My God, there are 10 tractor-trailers. It’s incredible.”

If Mills is unaccustomed to the pace and scale of American touring, she nonetheless feels perfectly at home on stage. She comes, after all, from an eminent theatrical family.

Her father, Sir John Mills, who turns 90 in February, started on the London stage and became a British movie star, working with such celebrated luminaries as David Lean and Noel Coward, and eventually won an Academy Award for “Ryan’s Daughter” in 1970.

Her mother, 86, is the novelist and playwright Mary Hayley Bell, who wrote “Whistle Down the Wind,” the basis for the 1961 movie of the same name (in which Hayley starred) as well as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s most recent musical flop.

And her sister, Juliet Mills, 55, made it to London’s West End at 16. The two of them remain “very close,” Mills said, and have even toured together across Australia and New Zealand in Coward’s “Fallen Angels.”.

Though her sister long ago moved to New York and another sibling, her brother John, moved to Los Angeles, Mills continues to live in England.

For 18 years, she’s had the same house in Hampton Court, an old section of London near the Thames River, where Elizabeth I was born.

“My roots are in England,” she said. “My family is there. I’m very English in many, many ways. But in a sense I’ve had two lives, two identities.

“For a while I had the identity that was connected with those early American movies, and it manifested itself in a very different way here than in England. When I went back home, it was to a much calmer, more realistic world.

“I wasn’t recognized that much. A bit perhaps, but it was very low key. There wasn’t this fan-magazine thing that there was in America. So I had a normal life. It was balanced between boarding school and living on a farm in Sussex.”

Finding a balance today, between home and the road, has turned out to be more difficult than she expected.

“It’s a bit much for flesh and blood,” Mills said. “I actually fell by the wayside in Cleveland. I got ill. My sister had to come out and look after me.”

But despite the exhaustion, she added, “you learn an enormous amount.”

What about?

“About your ability to see something through. About stamina. About dealing with boredom. About,” Mills paused, then continued with a laugh, “packing quickly.”

* “The King and I” opens Tuesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Today-Friday., 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. $21-$52.50. (714) 556-2122.