Phil Collins has buried the hatchet with his actress daughter Lily, almost a decade after they fell out over her memoir.
The Emily in Paris star, 37, criticised her dad, 75, for being absent from her life and “not the dad I expected”, in her 2017 book, Unfiltered: No Shame, No Regrets, Just Me.
In the book, she wrote a scathing open letter accusing the Genesis legend of not being around enough as she grew up.
Addressing the letter on Piers Morgan’s Uncensored, Phil claimed Lily regretted the “hurtful” note.
“She wishes she hadn’t written it. Because she thought it was hurtful. I’m not saying it isn’t hurtful,” he said. “I know what I did or what I shouldn’t have done. I treated her mum badly. I tried to always be there for her. Whenever, from the age from five or six, whenever I left the house to go off, I’ve always tried to be there for her.”
Phil decided to unite his family together last Christmas, spending four days together at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Knightsbridge, London.
The Sussudio singer continued, “Normally the kids would visit a couple at Christmas, a couple of New Year, a couple in the middle because everybody’s got families or girlfriends and I thought, ‘Well, it’d be nice if he could just get all get together’, because he knows how many Christmases there I left, you know.”
Phil, who has suffered from alcohol-related illnesses and diabetes, described the family get-together as “moving” as he feared he may never get to spend another Christmas with Lily, who welcomed a daughter, Tove, last year.
“It was wonderful to hear their stories of how they feared they wouldn’t see me again,” he recalled. “And Lily, for example, she just burst into tears, because she now has a child and she said, ‘I never thought that my child would get to know her grandfather’… It was very touching, very moving.”
In 2024, Phil had spent seven months in intensive care after a prolonged battle with alcoholism left him with permanent damage to his pancreas and kidneys. His manager Tony Smith gathered his five children together, fearing he may be days from death, but the drummer and vocalist does not even remember their visit.
The In the Air Tonight hitmaker told Piers, “I spent all that time in hospital and I can’t really remember too much about it. I remember certain things… I was on a dialysis machine and things were just breaking down.”
The British rocker divorced Jill Tavelman, Lily’s mother, in 1996 after 12 years of marriage.
They will be teaming up for a charity auction next month.
