Kylie, cocaine and the night I passed out on top of Jack Nicholson
No, he’s NOT just a bland has-been. Jason Donovan is back — and shockingly honest about his past
JASON DONOVAN is frustrated. He wants to be taken more seriously. ‘But it’s difficult because I have to get around that “Jason Donovan” profile. I need to get producers to think of me in a different way . . .’ He looks at me hard. I nod. ‘I am capable of it, though,’ he insists. ‘It’s called reinvention. I’d like to do more straight acting. I’d like to do more TV drama — and I’m working on that.’
But I have to confess that I am finding it hard to think of him as anyone other than Jason Donovan, famous for being Scott in Neighbours, for his blond mullet, toothpaste advert smile and for marrying Kylie Minogue’s Charlene in the event that encapsulated the eighties.
It’s 28 years since that seminal moment in episode 523, which was watched by 20 million viewers in Britain alone, but the image is fixed in the mind of a generation.
On the back of it, he’s had a singing career, briefly massive, which included four Number One singles and a Number One album, Ten Good Reasons.
It’s this that brings him here today. Next year he will embark on a Ten Good Reasons UK tour playing to crowds who, he says, ‘want to be taken back to that moment in the eighties when they were young and free’. Later, in 1991, there was his turn in the lead role of Joseph And His Technicolour Dreamcoat, which began a long career in musicals. In the past year he’s appeared in Priscilla, Queen of The Desert, Annie Get Your Gun, The War Of The Worlds and, in a break from musical theatre, The King’s Speech — as George VI’s speech therapist, Aussie Lionel Logue.
So why won’t more producers give Donovan, 47, a second glance? Why shouldn’t he join the pantheon of other Australian soap graduates — including Guy Pearce and Margot Robbie — and appear in serious roles?
‘Shakespeare is certainly something I’m interested in,’ he says. ‘I’d love to do Shakespeare. I think I’d probably be great. I don’t have incredible films under my belt, like Guy Pearce, but, you know, it’s never too late.
‘I believe that hard work will pay off, because that’s where I’m most at home: as an actor.’ He says he ‘fell into’ musical theatre when Andrew Lloyd Webber cast him as Joseph (for which he was paid £30,000 a week) and that he still loves it. (‘Don’t get me wrong, musical theatre has been good to me.’) He just feels that he’s still ‘chasing his craft’.
We meet on a bracing November morning, but he’s dressed in shorts and T-shirt (‘It’s what I wear 99 per cent of the time’), apologising to his dentist on the phone for missing an appointment. He talks to me wearing what looks like a gum shield used for whitening, though he swears it’s for teeth straightening.
For years, the only controversial thing about Donovan was that he heralded the dawn of plastic pop, courtesy of Stock Aitken Waterman. His off-screen relationship with Kylie was sweet: it was consummated in a Travelodge and they drank milkshakes together. But when Kylie’s singing career rocketed in 1988, they were increasingly apart. Kylie lost weight and chopped off her trademark curls. After just over two years together, she dumped Donovan over the phone for Michael Hutchence, the sexy lead singer of INXS and one of Donovan’s all-time rock heroes.
Following the split, Donovan embraced the single life, throwing himself into the London party scene.
He’d never been a drinker, but had always loved a ‘doobie’ (a joint). He first tried cocaine at 18 and said in his autobiography, Between The Lines: My Story Uncut, that he ‘knew there and then that this was a drug I could get a taste for’.
Cocaine was then scarce in Australia, but when he moved to London it was ‘commonplace’. At dinner parties it was brought out ‘like it was Wall’s Viennetta,’ he wrote.
‘Why did I take drugs? I took them because I enjoyed taking them. I liked the way they made me feel,’ he said.
‘On coke, I was king of the hill, master of my destiny, ruler of the universe and, frankly, the most interesting person in the room. I could talk about myself for hours on end.’
By the end of his stint as Joseph, he’d ‘come off stage… get out of that loincloth, coat and wig’ and head to the lavatory. ‘I’d cut myself one hell of a line and snort it all up in one go.’
Before long he had a three-gram-aday habit and even his drugs dealer was worried, saying: ‘I consider myself to be a friend, not just your dealer. By taking these three grams of coke, you are now an addict.’ FEW others noticed. ‘As far as anyone was concerned, I was the golden boy next door. even when I had the best part of a gram up my nose, I still looked like butter wouldn’t melt.’ But then he began collapsing in public. ‘I fell into the small percentage of people who regularly fit when they are on [coke].’ The first time was in Melbourne in 1994. He claimed it was an asthma attack.
Four months later he collapsed in a London club. That time he said he’d fainted. Not long after, he fell on top of actor Jack Nicholson at someone’s house. It was simply passed off as ‘too much champagne’.
Then, in 1995, he suffered cocaineinduced convulsions at Kate Moss’s 21st at the Viper Rooms in Los Angeles and was rushed to hospital.
A few hours later, he discharged himself and continued chopping out lines
in his hotel room. Over the following months, he had fits in private and in public. He let people believe that he had epilepsy.
But rumours about cocaine abuse persisted. Donovan decided ‘in a fit of madness — and quite a lot of drugs’, he says, to admit to his habit publicly.
By 1998, his family intervened and his actor father, Terence, wrote him an open letter published in Woman’s Day magazine.
‘On more than one occasion I warned you that you were killing yourself,’ he wrote. His son only read the first paragraph. So how did he stop? ‘Very suddenly,’ he says. The catalyst was when his on-off girlfriend Angela Malloch (now his wife) told him that she was pregnant. She gave him an ultimatum: drugs or fatherhood.
‘It was 2000 and my daughter Jemma was born. The sun was shining and it was a new day,’ he says. ‘It was time to move on.’ He was able — and this is surprising — to quit without support.
‘I didn’t do NA [Narcotics Anonymous]. I didn’t do any of it. I totally appreciate that some people do need that and support groups are very useful, but you’ve got to want to change. And if you don’t want to change, no one is going to convince you to do it.’ MORE challenging was his uphill struggle to revive his flagging showbiz career. He appeared on reality TV programmes such as I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! and Strictly Come Dancing.
About cocaine, he now says: ‘The great thing about that time of my life is that I now know what I don’t want to do.’ These days, he prefers a glass of wine.
‘I didn’t drink until the age of 32 or 33,’ he says. ‘I didn’t enjoy alcohol. But now I love bordeaux and French champagne, pinot grigio and sauvignon blanc. I’m not big on Australian wine.’
He takes a similarly black-andwhite approach to dealing with the fact that his mother, Sue Menlove (now MacIntosh), abandoned him when he was only five to move in with her lover.
He hasn’t spoken to her since his parents’ divorce and I suggest that many might have been scarred by that childhood and would turn to therapy.
‘I don’t do therapy,’ he says matter-of-factly. ‘I don’t need therapy. Maybe it’s surprising given my background, but it’s something I’ve never needed. I can understand some people do, but I’ve been able to deal with my issues with my own understanding of what I am, who I am and where I fit in. I keep physically fit, which helps.’
Donovan has three children: Jemma, 15, Zac, 14, and Molly, five. He describes his role in the family as ‘the hunter gatherer — but in a sort of non-sexist way.
‘I work and I do a lot of travelling, so I don’t spend as much time at home as I’d like. My wife recognises that, with three children, if she was to go to work we’d have to pay for someone to babysit.’
As for the trials of raising teenagers, he admits: ‘I leave that up to Ange. I don’t get involved.’ He says Ange is ‘tough’ and they’ve been through ‘a lot of nannies’, because ‘she really watches them and protects her children and that’s absolutely fair enough’.
He says he is no longer in touch with Kylie or anyone from the Neighbours days.
‘If I see Kylie at an event we’ll say hello. Absolutely. She’s not someone I ignore. So, yes, socially we’re in touch — but otherwise, no.’
We return to his forthcoming tour. ‘My singing confidence and my voice have never been better,’ he says, though he refuses to demonstrate.
In years gone by, women were stretchered out of his concerts every 20 seconds in full swoon. ‘But I didn’t ever have girls hiding in hotel cupboards, like Duran Duran did,’ he says. ‘Certainly [they mobbed] the stage door and camped outside my house.’
So does he miss the adulation? ‘It became claustrophobic. Look, I’m down-to-earth. I’ve always remained true to my roots.
‘I’m Australian. I come from a meritocracy. I’m not deluded by illusions of grandeur. I knew that time in my life wasn’t going to last for ever.’ Nor did he sleep with hundreds of groupies.
‘I was professional, and I was on TV, too, don’t forget. I had to get up and learn my lines the next morning. I didn’t really need to indulge in that activity. Hopefully, it says a lot about me.’
even if he does return to TV drama, he says he won’t abandon theatre. ‘I’ve aged well with it. I have a niche. Producers know I can sing, I can act and I can dance — much to my children’s discontent — and I can put bums on seats. That’s not a list many people my age have got. It’s a currency. It keeps me drinking decent wine.
‘I’ve never felt naturally gifted — I’ve had to work hard at it and I’ll continue to so. My wife said the other day, “That’s the one thing I’ll say: you work really hard.”
‘So these other people who are coming out of [soap] shows, let’s see where they are in 15 years time and then we’ll judge how I’ve done.’
Jason Donovan’s Ten Good Reasons and Greatest Hits tour, February to May 2016. Full details at www.jasondonovan.com