On the red carpets of Los Angeles, Lily Collins moves through camera flashes with the ease of someone who has spent her life around fame. But the scenes that matter most to her right now are happening far from premieres and billboards: quiet visits to a frail father who now needs round‑the‑clock care just to get through the day.
Phil Collins, the drummer‑turned‑megastarwhose songs defined the 1980s and 90s, is 76 and in visibly brutal shape. The man who once hammered out drum fills standing up on arena stages now relies on a cane, a battered knee that has endured five operations, and, by his own account, a24‑hour live‑in nurse.
Behind the medical detail sits a more intimate story: a daughter who spent much of her childhood feeling abandoned, now choosing to be her father's emotional anchor as his health and independence ebb away.
Collins has been candid in recent years about the catalogue of problems that have caught up with him. Years of touring and physical punishment behind the drum kit left his back and legs in pieces. He has spoken openly of a "weakened condition" he partly blames on his long struggle with alcohol, which he says he finally gave up in 2023. His knee remains so damaged that even repeated surgery has not spared him from walking with a stick.
The health decline is severe enough that he now has a nurse with him around the clock. It is an undignified comedown for a man who once fronted Genesis in front of hundreds of thousands of fans, and who could bounce from stadium to stadium with apparently inexhaustible energy.
Yet people close to the family insist the picture is not simply one of slow collapse. What has changed, and what they describe almost with relief, is the presence at his side of Lily Collins, theEmily in Parisstar whose relationship with her father for years was painfully complicated.
'He and Lily had their ups and downs over the years, everyone knows that,' one insider says. 'But she's been firmly back in his life for a long time now and the bond between them is very strong. She checks in on him constantly and goes to visit him whenever she can. She does it quietly – it's not about getting publicity – she genuinely adores her dad and wants to spend as much time with him as possible.'
It is striking language given how publicly she once wrote about the damage of his absence.
In her 2017 memoirUnfiltered, Collins described a childhood shaped by distance. After Phil divorced her mother, Jill Tavelman, when Lily was five, she and Jill stayed in Los Angeles while he was mostly in England or Switzerland, swallowed up by career and new relationships.
'He may have still been alive,' she wrote, 'but most of the time it felt as if he were completely gone. I knew he loved me, yet he wasn't physically around to tell me.' At one point she addressed him directly: 'I forgive you for not always being there... There's still so much time to move forward.'
Source: International Business Times UK
