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‑megastar whose 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, a 24‑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.
Phil Collins' Health Battle And Lily's Quiet Return
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, the Emily in Paris star 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 memoir Unfiltered, 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.'
That line reads very differently now. Then, it was a challenge wrapped in grace: an invitation to reconnect. Today, with Phil's body failing and the clock no longer theoretical, it has the feel of a promise she is determined to keep.
An 'Emotional Anchor' In A Tangle Of Family Ties
Phil Collins has never made a secret of his messy personal life. He is a father of five across three marriages: he adopted Joely, now 53, with his first wife Andrea Bertorelli, who is also mother to their son Simon, 49. Lily, 36, is his only child with second wife Jill Tavelman. His two youngest sons, Nic, 24, and Mathew, 20, are from his third marriage to Orianne Cevey.
The atlas of ex‑wives, half‑siblings and international homes became a kind of running joke in the tabloids – the price of fame, the collateral damage of success. It did not feel like a joke to Lily growing up, and she has been frank about the resentment and confusion she carried.
That is partly what makes this latest chapter so jarring, and so oddly hopeful. The same woman who once wrote about a father who was "completely gone" is now, according to those around the family, one of the people holding him most firmly in the present.
'Phil is close to all his kids,' the insider adds, 'but having Lily back in his life in such a big way gives him a lot of strength and something positive to focus on when things feel overwhelming.'
"Overwhelming" is an understated way of putting it. Collins has talked about how dependence has crashed into his pride – the 24‑hour nurse, the lost mobility, the sense that his own body has turned on him. For someone who has already spent years being reduced, unfairly, to gossip‑fodder about divorces and drink, there is a particular cruelty in ageing under a public gaze.
And yet, his daughter's presence has altered the script. Lily is not playing the dutiful child for cameras; there are no choreographed hospital photo‑ops. What people around them describe instead is something quieter: calls, check‑ins, visits squeezed in between shoots, the sort of practical love that does not need announcing.
It is, bluntly, the kind of steady attention he once struggled to give her.
There is a broader cultural echo here as well. For all the "nepo baby" discourse around Hollywood offspring made good, this is the much less glamorous reality of being the famous child of a crumbling icon: fielding health updates, watching a man you once resented become a man you worry might not see the next tour, the next Christmas, the next anything.
In that sense, Lily's role as what friends call an "emotional anchor" is not just about sweet bedside scenes. It is about lending her father some of the stability he failed to offer her when she needed it most – a quiet inversion of their old story.
Phil Collins will never again be the man leaping from the drum stool into the spotlight. He knows it, and the public does too. But there is a kind of dignity in the way this phase is playing out: an ageing musician finally surrounded by the children he helped bring into a chaotic world, and a daughter choosing, deliberately, to stand closer rather than drift away.
Against all odds – and he of all people would recognise the irony – the late‑life version of Phil Collins is being defined less by scandal than by something simpler and more stubborn: the hard work of forgiveness showing up, day after day, with flowers, phone calls and a hand on an unsteady arm.
Originally published on IBTimes UK
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