Paul's Got A Girlfriend
Paul McCartney's new love is a blonde activist who is a vegetarian and an animal lover.
Any similarities to his late wife, Linda, are probably not coincidental. Before he lost his wife to breast cancer in April 1998, McCartney was famously devoted to Linda, to whom he was married for 29 years.
To refer to his girlfriend, Heather Mills, as a former swimwear model is to do her a disservice by not quite telling the whole story.
Mills lost her left leg below the knee after a police motorcycle ran over it six years ago. Since then, she has become increasingly involved in charities for the disabled. And her friendship with McCartney blossomed after he helped her launch Voice, a single and accompanying video for charity.
After recovering, she spent much time helping others with similar disabilities and promoting fundraising efforts for land mine victims. She also recently branched out into acting, taking a part in a forthcoming BBC detective drama.
Mills' parents broke up during her childhood, and she lived at different times with each of them before running away as a young teen-ager.
In her autobiography, Out on a Limb, she said she had a brush with the law when she got a job with a jeweler after living on the streets in London. She stole some gold chains and was arrested and put on probation.
In 1990, before her accident, she helped set up a refugee crisis center in Yugoslavia, and set up the Heather Mills Trust to raise money for young disabled victims of war. In 1994, she took a convoy of donated prosthetic limbs to Croatia, and later did similar work in Cambodia.
The recipient of several humanitarian achievement awards, she campaigns for a ban on land mines and counsels amputees. Mills offers encouragement, not least by example: She skis, swims, snowboards and runs half-marathons.
"My legs are my fortune," she has said. "They are what I am known for in the modeling world. So after I lost my leg, I decided that I was really going to go for it. I got the best artificial limb that money could buy, and my career just carried on."
Her age has been reported variously as 32 and 34. But no matter how you slice it, she is many years younger than the 57-year-old McCartney, who has a 37-year-old stepdaughter, also named Heather, as well as two other daughters, Mary, 28, and Stella, 27, and a son, James, 22.
Probably in vain, McCartney has asked the media to allow him and Mills some privacy.
"What we don't need at this stage is photographers lurking in bushes. If this is to develop, then give us a chance," he said.
Since his wife's death (which he said almost killed him too), the former Beatle has tried hard to put his life back together, releasing the albums Run, Devil Run and A Garland for Linda, which was dedicated to his late wife.
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Of Mills, McCartney said, "Yes, we're very good friends. She's a very impressive woman. We aran item. We've done charity work together, and we've grown close. We have been on holiday together, and that's it."