What Happened to Heather Mills? Where She Is Now in 2026

For a few years in the 2000s, Heather Mills was one of the most talked-about — and most relentlessly scrutinised — women in Britain. She married a Beatle, divorced him in one of the ugliest tabloid spectacles in living memory, and seemed, to many casual observers, to vanish afterwards. But Mills never actually went quiet. She rebuilt herself as a vegan-food entrepreneur, a record-breaking disabled athlete, and a campaigner who has spent decades on landmine clearance. Here’s where Heather Mills is in 2026.

01Profile

Full name

Heather Anne Mills

Born

January 12, 1968 (58 years old)

Birthplace

Aldershot, Hampshire, England

Occupation

Businesswoman, campaigner, former model, former alpine skier

Best known for

Landmine activism, marriage to Paul McCartney (2002–2008), vegan food brand VBites

Notable record

Guinness World Record: fastest disabled female skier (2015)

Family

Married Mike Dickman (2021); daughter Beatrice (b. 2003)

It’s easy to forget how much of Mills’s life happened before — and after — the McCartney chapter that dominated her public image. The headlines focused on the divorce; the actual through-line of her story is a stubborn, sometimes combative drive to build things and campaign for causes.

02The Rise: Model to Campaigner

A modelling career cut short

Mills grew up in the north of England and worked as a model in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her career and her life changed dramatically in August 1993, when she was struck by a police motorcycle in London. The collision severed her lower left leg below the knee, and she has used a prosthetic limb ever since. Rather than retreat, Mills used the accident as a pivot point, turning her public profile toward disability and amputee causes.

From survivor to activist

In the years after the accident, Mills became a recognisable campaigner, particularly on the issue of landmines and the prosthetic needs of amputees in conflict zones. In 2001 she co-founded Adopt-A-Minefield UK in partnership with the United Nations Association, an initiative that raised funds to clear mined land and to fit survivors with artificial limbs. It was this campaigning work — not modelling — that put her in the orbit of the famous people who would reshape her public life.

03The Turning Point: The McCartney Years and the Divorce

Mills met Paul McCartney in 1999, reportedly at an awards event tied to her charity work. The couple married in June 2002 in Ireland, and their daughter, Beatrice, was born in 2003. For a stretch, Mills was one half of one of the most high-profile marriages in the world.

It did not last. The couple separated in 2006 and the divorce was finalised in 2008. What followed was an extraordinarily public legal process, covered exhaustively by the British press. According to mainstream reporting at the time, the High Court awarded Mills a settlement of around £24.3 million; the judgment itself was made public, and parts of it were notably unflattering to her. The coverage of the divorce — and of Mills personally — was intense, sustained, and often hostile.

• 1993Mills loses her lower left leg after being hit by a police motorcycle in London.
• 2001Co-founds Adopt-A-Minefield UK with the United Nations Association.
• 2002Marries Paul McCartney in Ireland; daughter Beatrice follows in 2003.
• 2007Competes on the US series "Dancing with the Stars," skiing aside her prosthetic to dance live on television.
• 2008Divorce from McCartney is finalised; UK courts report a settlement of roughly £24.3 million.
• 2019News Group Newspapers issues a public apology and settles her phone-hacking and privacy claims.

One part of the story took far longer to surface. In 2019, News Group Newspapers — publisher of The Sun and the now-defunct News of the World — issued a public apology to Mills and her sister and settled their claims over phone hacking and unlawful information-gathering. Press Gazette and the BBC reported that Mills described the payout as among the highest media settlements in British legal history, framing years of negative coverage as part of a “targeted smear campaign.” The settlement contained no admission of liability over allegations relating to The Sun. It was, for Mills, a long-delayed measure of vindication after a decade of headlines she had always insisted were unfair.

04Activism, the Leg, and the Vegan Empire

Record-breaking on the slopes

The same accident that ended Mills’s modelling career eventually led her somewhere unexpected: competitive alpine skiing. Skiing on a prosthetic leg, she pursued a place at the Winter Paralympics and chased speed records. In March 2015, at Vars in France, she was clocked at 103.6mph (about 164.95 km/h), which Guinness World Records later certified as the fastest speed achieved by a female disabled skier — a record that, by the BBC’s and Guinness’s accounts, still stood as of recent years. Her Paralympic ambitions were ultimately derailed by injury and an equipment dispute with officials, as covered by outlets including Inside the Games, but the world record remains a genuine, verified achievement.

Building VBites

Mills’s most enduring second act has been in food. A committed vegan, she founded the plant-based brand VBites, growing it into one of the UK’s longer-running meat-alternative companies. The business has not had a smooth ride: in December 2023, VBites collapsed into administration. As reported by The Caterer, Plant Based News, and others, Mills bought the brand back from administrators in early 2024 in a rescue deal reported at around £1 million, vowing to keep its staff and recipes alive.

Expansion through acquisition

Rather than retrench, Mills went on the offensive. Trade outlets including The Grocer and Vegan Food & Living reported that she acquired the online vegan retailer Alternative Stores in 2025, aiming to build what she described as a large, ethically run marketplace for plant-based products — explicitly pitched as a home for small family businesses squeezed out by big corporate platforms. She has also talked, in interviews with the vegan business press, about a longer-term plan to run sustainable “micro-factories” for regional production in multiple countries.

05What She Is Doing Now

Running her vegan portfolio

In 2026, Mills’s main public identity is as a vegan-food entrepreneur. Between the rescued VBites brand, the Plant & Bean manufacturing facility she took on, and the Alternative Stores online marketplace, she has assembled a small plant-based portfolio. In her own framing, the mission is as much about ethics and small-business survival as it is about profit.

“I aim to create an ethical online store that supports family businesses and diminishes the control of large corporations abusing their power.” — Heather Mills, on her Alternative Stores acquisition (reported by Vegan Food & Living, 2025)

Telling her own version

Mills has also spent recent years trying to reframe her own story on her own terms. In 2023 she took part in a Channel 5 documentary, “The Trials of Heather Mills,” giving her account of the marriage, the divorce, and the press coverage that surrounded both. It fit a pattern she has followed since the NGN settlement: pushing back, publicly and directly, against the version of herself that dominated the tabloids.

Still campaigning

Her activism has not disappeared. Mills continues to be associated with veganism and animal-rights advocacy and with the landmine and amputee causes that first made her a public figure decades ago. She has been recognised within the plant-based industry — including a “Vegan Woman of the Year” honour at a 2024 summit — for that combined work as entrepreneur and campaigner.

06Summary

Heather Mills’s public life has been defined, unfairly or not, by a few years in the 2000s. But the fuller picture is of a woman who lost a leg at 25 and built three different careers afterwards — campaigner, record-breaking athlete, and food entrepreneur — while fighting, in and out of court, over how her own story was told.

The tabloid years made Heather Mills famous for the wrong reasons. What’s harder to argue with is the work itself: a charity that cleared minefields, a world record set on one leg, and a vegan business she refused to let die. In 2026, that’s the story she’s still writing.