I forgive you dad, says the daughter Phil Collins left at age of 5
WITH five children by three wives, he was always going to struggle to be the perfect dad. Now Phil Collins has received some very public feedback from his daughter Lily.
Miss Collins, a rising Hollywood star, has written an open letter to her father, reassuring him he is ‘forgiven’ for ‘not being the dad I expected’. The 27-year-old, who recently received a Golden Globe nomination for her role in Warren Beatty’s Rules Don’t Apply, has published the letter in her debut book Unfiltered: No Shame, No Regrets, Just Me.
In the book, released today, she writes: ‘I forgive you for not always being there when I needed and for not being the dad I expected.
‘I forgive the mistakes you made. And although it may seem like it’s too late, it’s not. There’s still so much time to move forward.’ Miss
Collins, who was born in Surrey, is the only child from her 66-year-old father’s second marriage to American Jill Tavelman.
She was five when Collins split from her mother, reportedly ending the marriage by fax, before moving to Switzerland.
Following the break-up in 1994, Miss Collins and her mother, an antiques dealer, moved to Los Angeles and the star would only see her father during school holidays. In her open letter, part of a collection of personal essays aimed at teenage girls, she also wrote of her father: ‘We all make choices and, although I don’t excuse some of yours, at the end of the day we can’t rewrite the past.
‘I’m learning how to accept your actions and vocalise how they made me feel. I accept and honour the sadness and anger I felt toward the things you did or didn’t do, did or didn’t give me.’
Miss Collins also opens up about her battle with anorexia and bulimia, which she links to the stress caused by her father’s divorce from third wife Orianne Cevey in 2008.
She describes the ‘ terrible disconnect’ that grew between her and her father as she got older, living on a different continent from him, and declares that, ‘many of my deepest insecurities stem from these issues with my dad’.
Collins, who is worth around £115million recently reunited with Miss Cevey following their £25million divorce.
He lives in Miami with their sons Matthew, 12, and Nicholas, 15.