LILY COLLINS: The star winning over Hollywood

Lily Collins

People’s magazine ranked Lily Collins No 4 in its list of the world’s most beautiful women (Image: Getty )

 

A week last Wednesday the daughter of rock star Phil Collins flew to London from LA for the premiere of her film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil And Vile, in which she plays the girlfriend of the serial killer Ted Bundy (Zac Efron).

On Monday, she was back at the Curzon Mayfair for the premiere of Tolkein, posing with on-screen husband Nicholas Hoult who plays the Lord Of The Rings author.

Lily, 30, who played Fantine in the BBC’s Les Misérables earlier this year, isn’t stopping there.

She is lined up to star with Simon Pegg in independent thriller Inheritance, will play the lead role in forest survival movie Titan and returns to the small screen next year in Emily In Paris, the new series from Sex And The City creator Darren Star.

Not bad for someone who once seemed fated to be eclipsed by more famous names.

 

An early audition was for Bella Swan in blockbuster vampire series Twilight in 2008 but she lost out to Kristen Stewart.

Stewart was her nemesis again in 2012, winning the lead role in Snow White And The Huntsman.

And then Emma Stone – who later shot to fame in La La Land – beat her to the role of Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider-Man.

But Lily’s luck quickly changed when she was chosen, ironically enough, to be Snow White in comedy drama Mirror Mirror with Julia Roberts.

The film had mixed reviews but made £77million on a budget of £65million. Collins was on her way.

People magazine ranked her No 4 in its list of the world’s most beautiful women and offers poured in.

 

Zac Effron and Lily Cole

Co-star Zac Effron and Lily Cole in new movie Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (Image: Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile)

But life was never going to be plain sailing for a young woman who admits that she carries a lot of emotional baggage.

Her parents split when she was five – and it wasn’t amicable.

Phil, then 44, met 21-year-old translator Orianne Cevey in Geneva and was smitten.

“For the next couple of days, I’m like a dog with two tails,” he wrote in his memoir Not Dead Yet, “but at the same time: I’m about to go to Paris. And in Paris, I’m due to meet my wife and our five-year-old daughter, who are flying in from London. What have I done? Well, I know what I’ve done. I’ve betrayed my wife and child. Again. And I’ve set sail for perilously uncharted waters. ‘Meet Phil Collins’s new mystery girlfriend. She’s young enough to be his daughter’. Ticks all the midlife crisis boxes.

“I try to outline the way I feel about us, about the future. The most reliable and quickest way to get this letter to her is to fax rather than post it. So that’s what I do.”

 

Ditched by fax, Collins’s American wife Jill Tavelman won a divorce settlement of £26million.

With nothing to keep her in the UK, she moved to LA with Lily.They soon made themselves at home, Jill as president of the Beverly Hills Women’s Club and Lily at prestigious Harvard-Westlake School, whose alumni include the actresses Jamie Lee Curtis, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Tori Spelling.

By now Lily had a column, LA Confidential, in British magazine Elle Girl and fashioned a celebrity-offspring role.

At 18 she starred in an episode of LA reality show The Hills.

But Lily tired of being a socialite and studied broadcast journalism at the University of Southern California.

It didn’t last.

The girl who had her first acting job aged two (BBC comedy-drama Growing Pains) found the lure of showbiz iresistible.

 

Les Misérables

Lily played Fantine in the BBC’s Les Misérables earlier this year (Image: BBC Studios / Lookout Point / Robert)

In 2009 alone she was in two episodes of teen drama 90210 and played Sandra Bullock’s daughter in The Blind Side, while Maxim magazine named her one of the Hottest Daughters of Rock Stars.

There were parts in thrillers Abduction and Priest, then Mirror Mirror.

Said one critic: “She has an adorable, sensational, almost perfect face for cinema; think Audrey Hepburn with the eyebrows of Liam Gallagher.”

Ah, yes, the eyebrows.

Dark and luxuriant, they are her most distinctive feature.

They even have their own fan account on Twitter.

“It’s hilarious that people think that I have the best eyebrows in Holly-wood,” she once said.

“It used to bother me – having bigger, fuller brows. I even plucked them once so I’d fit in but I hated them and couldn’t wait for them to grow back. Now I embrace them. I realised the quirky things that make you different are what make you beautiful.”

 

But behind the scenes not everything was lovely.

In 2017, aged 27, she published her memoir Unfiltered: No Shame, No Regrets, Just Me.

She discusses the eyebrows, an unnamed emotionally abusive relationship and publishes an open letter to her father, forgiving him “for not always being there” during her childhood.

But after finishing a harrowing chapter on her struggle with eating disorders she received the script for To The Bone wanting her to play Ellen, an anorexic 20-year-old whose battle leads her to group treatment headed by an unorthodox doctor (Keanu Reeves).

Lily was so thin it was affecting her life.

“I was about to embark on press for [2016 film] Rules Don’t Apply and I was told a lot of media did not want to put me in their magazines,” she said.

“No one knew my connection to the disorder, and at the time I was super upset because I thought, this is a huge moment and I can’t maximise on it. But it hit me, ‘Oh, this is going to majorly **** with your career, not just your health’.”

 

Snow White

Lily was chosen to be Snow White in comedy drama Mirror Mirror with Julia Roberts (Image: Snow White Productions)

She accepted the role of Ellen.

“It’s very rare that one gets the opportunity to wear shoes you once wore with a different mindset and perspective on things,” she said.

Now well, she is one of Hollywood’s hottest properties but her love life is a mystery.

She once dated Extremely Wicked co-star Zac Efron and was in an on/off relationship with Jamie Campbell Bower – whom she met on the set of The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones in 2013 – for five years.

But one man in her life is her father, who has had to come to terms with Lily, who has 14.6 million Instagram followers, eclipsing his solo successes and fame with rock band Genesis.

“Someone told me they were listening to the radio and they were playing classic hits,” Lily recalled.

“At the end the DJ came on and said, ‘For all of you who don’t know, that was Phil Collins – Lily Collins’s dad’.”

source: express.co.uk