How Phil Collins’ divorce drove his daughter to anorexia
. . . and why — years later — she’s made herself lose 20lb for a controversial new film about eating disorders
LILY COLLINS’ bones are jutting out, her cheeks are hollow and her eyes all but protuding from their sockets. She’s playing a 20- year- old with an eating disorder in her latest film and she looks alarming frail.
Yet in what is a tough and unsparing portrayal, she refused most of the standbys other actresses have used when taking roles as anorexics: chiefly pale make-up and oversized clothes.
Instead, 28-year- old Miss Collins, the Surrey-born daughter of former Genesis frontman Phil and his second wife, Jill Tavelman, drew on her own teenage experience and reportedly shed 20lb.
The film, To The Bone, is being accused of shallowness, sexism and glamorising and exploiting anorexia. But in her first full interview about the movie, Lily argues that she is simply telling it like it is and hopes vulnerable teenagers will take notice.
‘It’s a story that needs to be told and I’m best placed to tell it,’ she says.
‘It was never meant to encourage young girls to think they could look better by starving themselves. It was part of a wider conversation about mental health which needs to be heard more often.’
She believes her own battle began due to stress at school and the emotional turmoil when her father divorced Lily’s stepmother, his third wife Orianne, in 2008.
‘There was a terrible disconnect that grew between us,’ she later explained. ‘Many of my deepest insecurities stem from my issues with my dad.’
It brought back memories of Collins’ bitter break-up with Lily’s mother, his American second wife Jill Tavelman, in 1996, when Lily was seven years old. It was widely reported that the first Jill knew of the 12-year marriage being over was when he told her by fax, although Collins has since denied this.
Jill was awarded a £17 million settlement and three years later, in 1999, Phil married Swiss-born Orianne Cevey. They divorced nine years later, with Orianne getting a £25 million settlement, but were reconciled two years ago.
COLLINS’ first marriage, to Andrea Bertorelli in 1975, had also ended in bitterness after five years, when she left him following an affair with a painter and decorator. It inspired his first solo hit, In The Air Tonight, and he famously promoted the song on Top Of The Pops in 1981 with a conspicuous pot of paint placed on the piano.
Lily, who went to school in Los Angeles, lived with Jill after the divorce and her relationship with her father remained strained. When she heard that his marriage to Orianne was also in trouble, she became anorexic and bulimic.
She gorged on junk food, then forced herself to throw up, causing her hair to fall out and her nails to become brittle.
‘ My throat burned and my oesophagus ached,’ she has explained. ‘My periods stopped for two years and my life was out of control. I was terrified I had ruined my chances of ever having kids.’
You wouldn’t know it, to see her in the flesh today. She is looking healthily slender in a glamorous yellow Miu Miu dress and her eyes and skin are glowing.
She now has a good relationship with her dad, of whom she speaks to me lovingly, and her problems have been overcome, so when she was asked to play anorexic patient Ellen in To The Bone, she felt confident enough to revisit her personal nightmare years on screen without slipping back into old ways.
‘I’d decided to write a book about my life and, ironically, just as I was starting on the chapter about my eating problems, I was sent the script for To The Bone. It wasn’t about me. It was a semi-autobiographical film by the American screenwriter and director Marti Noxon (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Glee) about her battle with anorexia. And she had no idea that I’d been through the same thing — not many people did.
‘And if that’s not a sign from the universe that this is something you need to talk about, I don’t know what is. I had already been doing research for my book by reading back in my old journals, looking at old photographs and talking to friends and family about what had happened to me.
‘The script rang so true. I thought, “The person who wrote this really experienced the situation,” and there were definitely some situations I could relate to.
‘It was a new form of recovery for me. I got to experience it as my character, Ellen, but also as Lily.
‘I was terrified that doing the movie would take me backwards, but I had to remind myself that they hired me to tell a story, not to be a certain weight. In the end, it was a gift to be able to step back into shoes I had once worn, but from a more mature place.’
Her darkest moment in the film, she says, was a scene where she has to strip off and stand on the bathroom scales while her movie stepmother ( played by Carrie Preston) takes her picture.
‘I didn’t realise she would really photograph me on her iPhone, but she did. Then she showed it to me and said: “This is what you look like. Do you think this is beautiful?” I was shocked by how I looked. It was a moment that resonated a lot, not just as my character but as me, because I was actually seeing myself.’
After the movie, Lily admits she felt uncomfortable. ‘If I could have snapped my fingers and put my weight back on in a second, I would have done. I was too thin and didn’t look good. Yet back in my teenage days I was desperate to lose every ounce I could.’
Lily says she has finally let go of the need to be ‘perfect’.
‘From a young age I’ve had a desire to put forward this perfect image, whatever perfect was,’ she says. ‘So even though there was all this un-prettiness going on inside me, I wanted to make sure that my appearance and composure were a certain way .
‘Now I feel like I’m starting with a clean slate, so when I take a role I can let go more.’
But watching Lily play a character dealing with such a similar disorder was tough for her mother to handle. Jill hadn’t wanted Lily to accept the role in the first place, afraid that it would trigger her eating disorder again.
The first time her mother saw the film, Lily says, ‘she was a bit in shock. The second time I looked over at the end and she was sobbing — it really hit her hard.
‘ I never wanted her to feel responsible; she’s like my best friend. When she saw the movie, I think she recognised so much of me in Ellen.’
She is anxious to emphasise that nobody put any pressure on her to lose weight for the film.
‘No one set any sort of goal for me in that sense, but I wanted to emulate the character I was playing as much as possible. When you’re acting you do change yourself both physically and emotionally for any role you take — you gain weight, you lose weight, you do anything.’
FOR some extreme shots, the director did resort to computer trickery to further emphasise her real weight loss, and in one scene her body and that of another woman in recovery from anorexia are ‘moulded together’. But she was determined to do most of the hard work herself.
‘ I had the supervision of a
nutritionist; plus my mother and the producers, Marti Noxon the writer-director, and all my friends were keeping an eye on me, so I was in a safe environment.
‘Food is fuel, and if I was going to cut down on it we were adamant that there had to be a programme in place to make sure I never got overly tired, so I never reached a point where I forgot my lines. And I never missed a day’s work.’
Lily’s commitment paid dividends: the movie premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this year and was immediately snapped up by Netflix for £ 6.5 million, for showing on television from tonight.
Her own memoir — entitled Unfiltered: No Shame, No Regrets, Just Me — was written particularly with young women in mind, covering a spectrum of problems from physical insecurities to abusive boyfriends to eating disorders.
‘ I was receiving so many messages from young girls on social media explaining their problems and various insecurities, and they’d always say, “Not that you could ever relate to this because you’re an actress …” or “because you look a certain way …” and I’d think to myself, “You don’t know, but that is so far from the truth!”
‘I’ve had insecurities all along about the way I look — about my eyebrows, my English accent in America, my ivory skin that wouldn’t tan — and those eating disorders, too. And that prompted me to write a book just airing everything, saying to those young girls: “This is me, this is what I’ve been through, there’s no shame in talking about it.”
Frankness, she thinks, is key. ‘I’m 28 years old now and I want to have kids one day. And if I do have kids, then I don’t want to pass on any of the old secrecy to them — I want us all to be able to talk about things and deal with them in the open.’
During the bad times, like many anorexics and bulimics, she struggled on in secret until her friends, family and school counsellors stepped in with help. Along the way, she became addicted to diet pills and laxatives, and admits she has had a continuing struggle with these issues that flared up as recently as 2013.
To a former sufferer, the thought of tackling the painful subject on screen seemed appropriate, but also daunting.
‘But as soon as I read the script, I thought I need to do this. There are nerves involved in taking any part, of course, and the idea of stepping back into the shoes you wore at a less-than-positive time in your life is something that you think about a little more.
‘But again, I was surrounded by so many people who were looking after me and I felt, “OK, I am at the point now where I’m strong enough to tell this story. And if anyone is going to tell it, I feel it was meant to be me.”
‘And I am proud of the movie we have made, and if it means we continue to have conversations about a disorder that is too rarely talked of, then our mission has been accomplished.’
AFTER relationships with actors Zac Efron and Jamie Campbell Bower — and, reportedly, singer Nick Jonas — Lily is currently single.
‘Yes, I’ve had some relationships that haven’t worked out,’ she says cheerfully. ‘ And I’ve learned a lot about myself through them.’
As for that ambition to have children eventually, she says: ‘I’ve never given myself a timeline and right now there are so many other things going on in my life that it’s not my focus.
‘When it does happen, I’d like to be like my own mother, who is my best friend, always encouraging and fun, but also has a line where I respect her, too.
‘I hope I can be half the mother to my child that my mother was to me.’
And the weight struggles? When she looks at herself in the mirror, what does she see?
‘Perfect doesn’t exist,’ she says. ‘I used to think perfection was about what I looked like, but now I see it’s so much more about how I feel.
‘When you’re happy — when you’re smiling and radiant — that’s when you look your best anyway. And that comes from inside, not out.’
To The Bone is available on Netflix from today.