Heather Mills's Real Name: Heather Mills

Quick answer: She is known as Heather Mills, and during her marriage to Paul McCartney she also appeared as Heather Mills McCartney. Hello! magazine and her official website both give her birth date as January 12, 1968, in Aldershot, England. A Library of Congress record uses the heading Mills McCartney, Heather, with Heather Mills as a cross-reference.

Real name and early life

Hello! magazine's profile says she was "born on January 12, 1968, in Aldershot, England." Her official website says, "Heather was born on 12th January 1968," and that she was born in Aldershot and raised in Newcastle in a working-class family. The Library of Congress authority file lists the heading Mills McCartney, Heather, 1968-, with cross-references to Heather Mills and Heather Mills McCartney, and notes that British library usage is Heather Mills.

Both sources describe a difficult childhood. Hello! says her parents' relationship was violent and that her mother left the family home before Heather turned ten. Her website says an abusive father and an oppressed mother pushed her to look after her siblings.

Career highlights

The two sources date her modelling start differently. Hello! says her first husband, Alfie Karmal, encouraged her modelling aspirations when she was 18, and that she founded an agency, ExSell Management, which she sold in 1989. Her website says she began modelling after a friend entered her in the Miss Cinzano competition in 1991 and that she then opened Exsell Model Management.

Hello! says she set up a refugee centre during the war in the former Yugoslavia. Both sources say that in August 1993, back in Britain, she was hit by a police motorcycle; Hello! says she lost the lower half of her left leg, and her website lists a fractured skull, crushed pelvis, and punctured lung. Hello! says her Heather Mills Health Trust sent donated prosthetic limbs to amputees abroad from 2000 to 2004.

Hello! says she met Paul McCartney at a charity awards event in May 1999, married him at Castle Leslie in Ireland on 11 June 2002, and had a daughter, Beatrice, in 2003. It says the couple announced their separation in May 2006 and later divorced; Encyclopaedia Britannica's McCartney entry also names her as his former wife.

Her website says she appeared on Dancing with the Stars, The Jump, and Dancing on Ice, took up ski racing at 42 in 2010, joined the British Disabled Ski Team, and set a speed-skiing mark of 166.84 km/h in 2015 that Guinness World Records recognised in 2023. It dates her vegan company VBites to 2008; Hello! says 2009.

Name notes for searchers

People looking up Heather Mills or Heather Mills McCartney are looking for the same person. McCartney was a married name, used in the Library of Congress heading.