Actress Donna Mills, 85, best known for playing Abby Cunningham on the primetime soap “Knots Landing,” says her lifelong independence is the reason she has never married despite a 25-year relationship with actor Larry Gilman, 76.
Speaking on the “Still Here Hollywood Podcast with Steve Kmetko,” Mills, who has been with Gilman since 2001, said marriage simply never fit how she wanted to live.
“I was always so independent,” she told Kmetko. “I’m still very independent.”
“I just didn’t ever want to be subject to whatever you have to do when you get married,” she continued. “I also didn’t want to say I was going to love somebody forever. I don’t know if I would do that or not,” she added with a laugh.
Mills said the subject has come up with her daughter, Chloe, whom she adopted as a newborn in 1994 at age 54. Chloe recently married and had a baby of her own.
“It’s funny because my daughter asked me that. My daughter just got married,” Mills said. “And she just had a baby.” When Kmetko said she didn’t look like a grandmother, Mills showed off a necklace reading “Grandma,” a gift from Chloe that she said she wears all the time. The two have debated what Mills’s grandson will call her — Mills proposed “Glamma,” but said Chloe wasn’t a fan.
Mills began dating Gilman in 2001, seven years after adopting Chloe. She has previously described him as “an incredibly kind, funny, wonderful man.” “I love him,” she told The Daily Beast in 2022. “I’m lucky to have found him. I found him late, but I found him. Everybody loves him. He’s great.”
Before Gilman, Mills had an on-and-off, roughly 20-year relationship starting in 1979 with advertising executive Richard Holland, previously married to singer Chaka Khan. Asked why neither relationship led to marriage, Mills said, “I don’t remember anyone ever getting down on one knee.”
She said meeting Gilman later in life, after both had built independent careers and lives, made marriage impractical. “I am so freaking independent. I just am. I’m very independent and by the time Larry and I met we were both pretty established,” she said. “To combine everything at that point is really difficult. So we just combined our lives but not our finances and stuff like that. It’s much cleaner, much better.”
That independence, she said, has always been central to how she sees herself, even within a long partnership. “I’ve always felt a woman being independent was important,” she said. “It made me feel safer, I guess, to know that I can take care of myself. I want someone to be in my life to love and be with, to be a companion and to go places and all that, but if I have to I can take care of myself.”
Mills added a wry nod to her soap opera past: “And really, I had enough marriages as Abby!” Her character on “Knots Landing,” which ran from 1980 to 1989, married four times over the course of the series, with one union annulled almost immediately.
Mills and Gilman share a home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, where they keep a vineyard in Mandeville Canyon that Gilman planted for her. “Larry planted a vineyard for me last year,” Mills told Closer Weekly in 2015. “He’s really such a good guy.” The couple later launched Mandeville Vineyards, a small wine brand made from grapes grown on the property.
Mills, who launched an OnlyFans account in July, has talked about some of the unusual requests she’s fielded from subscribers, including one tied to the vineyard. On the “Creators Inc. Podcast” in August, host Andy Bachman, whose agency manages her OnlyFans account, said some subscribers had asked to see her stomping grapes barefoot in the vineyard. “I’m gonna do it,” Mills said. “I tried to shoot it myself. But you can’t shoot something while you’re stomping, it just doesn’t work.” “I’m going to do that very soon, and do it right so that people can really enjoy it,” she continued. “I think it’s really funny and fun, and it’s the kind of thing that I want to be able to share with the fans.”
