Ms Mills manages to be altruistic without coming across as sappy or self-righteous. This is a woman who's driven into war zones and sopped up the pus oozing from a child's shattered leg before attaching an artificial limb. When Heather Mills lost the lower half of her left leg at the age of 25, she accepted no limitations. A stranger to self-pity and depression, she learned again how to dance, ski, swim, scuba dive and play tennis, almost as well as she had before the accident. She continued to model, as much to challenge people's perceptions of what an amputee can do as to make money.
Most people question the value of their existence on milestone birthdays, if at all.
Four years later, when her father was imprisoned for fraud, Ms Mills had to help raise her younger brother and sister. It was sink or swim. So I learned that when anyone had a problem, it was up to me to come up with a solution. At 14, she was living on the streets of London. By 21, she had wed a British businessman she had met when she was 15, and she had begun modelling.