For nine seasons on Knots Landing, Donna Mills played the woman every cul-de-sac in America loved to watch scheming, and at 85 she is still keeping people guessing. Three months after she opened an OnlyFans account, the actress who made Abby Cunningham a Thursday night habit spent this week setting the record straight on how much money she has made, who decides which photos of her get posted, and what her subscribers can and cannot talk her into.
Mills, born December 11, 1940, in Chicago, sat down with ABC News correspondent Kayna Whitworth for a Nightline segment that aired October 23, and a clip went to People the same day. A day later she told Hello! magazine that some of the numbers floating around about her were wrong. Most of what she said was about coffee, workouts and old photo shoots, but there was one ordinary request she shut down flat.
How Did Abby Ewing End Up on OnlyFans?
The idea did not start with her. “They came to me, OnlyFans, and said, ‘Would you like to do this?'” Mills told TMZ when her page went live on July 30. “And I didn’t even know what it was.” What sold her was a promise she has repeated ever since. “What they said was, ‘You don’t have to do nakedness. You do it the way you want to do it,'” she recalled. We covered the launch when Donna Mills joined OnlyFans at 85 this summer, and the reaction was about what you would expect, which was equal parts cheering and disbelief.
The venture is managed by Creators Inc., and its CEO, Andy Bachman, is the source of the figure that made headlines in August. On the company’s podcast he told Mills she was doing well, with “many six figures” after only a short time on the platform, according to both USA Today and Page Six. Mills had a simpler explanation for why people were signing up. “They want to know me,” she told Bachman, meaning what she does at home when the cameras are off.
Some of what they wanted to know was unusual. One subscriber asked to see her stomp grapes at her vineyard, and Mills said she was game but ran into a practical problem, as Page Six reported. “I tried to shoot it myself,” she said. “But you can’t shoot something while you’re stomping, it just doesn’t work.” That cheerful shrug is the key to how she is running the page, and it is also why this week’s interviews took a firmer tone.
What Did She Say About the Money and Those Photos?
Asked by Hello! magazine about the six-figure reports, Mills said the number was “not exactly” right, and then added that she was “not supposed to say” how much she has received. She did not offer a correction, and the headline figure was Bachman’s to begin with.
She was more direct about the pictures. “Well, they’ve done a little bit of pushing, and I just say no, because sometimes they sort of doctor pictures,” she told the magazine. Edited images do not go up without her approval. “They have to send them to me first,” she said. “Then I go, ‘no, mm mm.'”
From the start, she said, she warned the company she was “not going to want to do what the other girls are doing on the site,” and she was promised “whatever makes you comfortable.” Her partner of 25 years, Larry Gilman, and her daughter, Chloe, both encouraged her. “I would never do anything that would embarrass my daughter,” Mills told Hello! She adopted Chloe as a newborn in 1994 and became a grandmother in 2025, which helps explain why she keeps drawing the line where she does.
Long Before Knots Landing, Who Was Donna Mills?
The Chicago native made her television debut in 1966 as a nightclub singer named Rocket on the CBS soap The Secret Storm. From 1967 to 1970 she played Laura Donnelly, a former nun, on Love Is a Many Splendored Thing, and in 1971 she starred opposite Clint Eastwood in Play Misty for Me as Tobie, the girlfriend caught in the path of his obsessed fan.
Then came 1980. Mills joined Knots Landing, the CBS spinoff of Dallas, as Abby Cunningham, the sister of Sid Fairgate, and she stayed through 1989. Abby schemed her way into the life of Gary Ewing and became Abby Ewing, and she gave Seaview Circle its best villain. Mills returned in 1993 for the final season and again for the 1997 reunion miniseries. Off camera she was producing too, with Donna Mills Productions turning out TV movies such as The World’s Oldest Living Bridesmaid in 1990.
She never really stopped working. In 2014 she joined General Hospital as Madeline Reeves, a role that won her a Daytime Emmy the next year, and in 2022 Jordan Peele cast her as Bonnie Clayton in Nope. She even posed for Playboy in 1987 and 1989 without ever taking her clothes off. So when Nightline asked about her page this week, she had decades of practice at deciding how much of herself to show.
The One Request She Won’t Fulfill
What her subscribers mostly get is everyday life. “I do the Peloton,” Mills told Nightline. “Just, you know, they’re the things of everyday life: having a cup of coffee, you know.” Some fans, it turns out, want something even more ordinary than that.
“They say they like it when you brush your teeth,” she said, before ending the matter. “I’m not going to brush my teeth.” Entertainment Weekly and USA Today both reported the same line from the segment. Grape stomping was fine, but brushing her teeth on camera is where Abby Ewing draws the line.
Her idea of allure has not changed much since the 1980s either. “I think it’s sexier to be not just totally naked, you know, and have a little imagination about it,” she told Whitworth. She is thinking about sharing unpublished outtakes from her Playboy shoots, including a favorite. “One of the pictures in Playboy, which I think is one of the sexiest things, is me in the shower, in a dress,” she said, and she guessed a fair price might be “maybe $100.” Asked whether most of her subscribers are men, she said, “I think so. Yeah. Sometimes you don’t know.”
What she hopes they take away has little to do with any of that. “I want to show that you can have a rich and happy life even after certain ages,” she told Hello! For a woman who spent the 1980s playing the most dangerous neighbor on television, she is setting her own rules at 85, and the toothbrush stays off camera.
