'I was just a boy. What did I know?'
If Jason Donovan were an animal, he’d surely be a cat, he’s had so many lives. A global star at 17, courtesy of his role as Scott Robinson in Neighbours, he went on to become a chart-topping pop singer – the biggest-selling recording artist in the UK and Europe in 1989 – a family theatre stalwart in musicals such as Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a television reality show favourite in that Australian jungle in 2006, a bit of a twinkle toes in 2011’s Strictly and now, aged 46, the leading man in a touring production of Annie Get Your Gun, which finally comes to rest in Torquay at the end of September. Phew!
On the personal front, his private life has been something of a switchback, veering wildly between first love (with Kylie), a wretched period in the 1990s when he fell in with the wrong crowd in the notoriously flesh-eating music business and very nearly didn’t survive, before finally setting down roots with a wife he adores and three children – Jemma is now 14, Zach, 13, and three-year-old Molly – who mean more to him than life itself.
His current sustained contentment is all the more remarkable when you take into account what he calls ‘the car-crash years’. He once said that he’d gone out in 1993 and didn’t really return home until the year 2000.
‘What happened to me was extraordinary at a very young age,’ he says now. ‘I’m not blaming that early success for what happened later. But it was a lot to take on. I was just a boy. What did I know?’
A number of factors conspired to propel him towards the drug habit that all but killed him. When Kylie put an end to their real-life romance – an eerie echo of what their soap characters, Scott and Charlene, had been playing out on screen – Jason was shattered. Nor was his self-esteem boosted when he discovered she’d melted into the arms of Michael Hutchence, bad-boy lead singer with Australian band INXS.
‘My look was so clean-cut, so New Romantic, with all that perfect hair and thick make-up. There was Kurt Cobain in ripped jeans telling us about the truth of life – and I got sucked in. I was keen to mess up my image a little.’ In the process, he all but messed up his life.
The 1990s were not kind to Jason on the personal front as he started appearing in the papers for all the wrong reasons, usually photographed falling out of various dives. Then, in 1995, at the infamous Viper Room in Los Angeles (where actor River Phoenix died on the pavement outside), Jason was attending the 21st birthday party thrown by Johnny Depp for model Kate Moss.
As he recounts in his no-holds-barred autobiography, Between The Lines: ‘My heart was racing, my vision was blurring and I was becoming disorientated. I tried to steady myself but my legs buckled and I fell to the floor.’ Someone called an ambulance and the last person Jason saw, ironically enough, was Michael Hutchence towering over him.
‘But almost the most shocking aspect of all,’ he says today, ‘was that it should have been a wake-up call and yet it wasn’t. That’s the problem with an addiction. You go back in and erase what went before and then carry on doing it all over again. And let me tell you: anyone who says marijuana doesn’t lead on to other drugs is deluded.
Jason and Kylie (Scott and Charlene) in Neighbours (1987)
‘Am I the sort of person who would advocate the use of drugs in any way, shape or form? Absolutely not. I’ve been clean for many years now. It just got to the point where it was becoming boring. That’s the only way to describe it. It was time to move on. I saw an opportunity and I grabbed it.’
That opportunity came in the shape of Angela Malloch, stage manager on the touring production of The Rocky Horror Show in which Jason would don high heels and fishnet stockings eight times a week to strut his stuff as Frank N Furter. ‘I’d be backstage waiting to go on and I’d get chatting to Ange.’
The blossoming friendship turned into romance but the relationship hit the buffers and the two of them called it a day. Shortly afterwards, Angela found out she was pregnant. It was ultimatum time. ‘If the relationship had any chance of working, she told me, and if I was going to have any involvement in the life of our child, I would have to get myself back on track. Permanently.’
By now, he was in his early 30s. It was time to take stock, both professionally and personally. ‘You either seize your opportunities or you don’t. And I did. I even gave up smoking, something I found much harder than kicking drugs.’ But, in the end, he says, you’ve got to want to change. ‘Elton John said it and it’s true: nobody can do it for you.’
Tacitly backing his son during these dark days was Terence Donovan, a respected actor in his native Australia. The two are particularly close. When Jason was five, his mother, Sue McIntosh, a TV newscaster, left the marital home. She later remarried and produced three daughters. Jason also has a younger half-brother, Paul, from a subsequent relationship of his father’s.
‘I’ve got a lot of respect for my dad. He’s a big hero of mine.’ When Jason was resolutely going off the rails in the 1990s, Terence took the decision not to come down heavily on him. ‘I think that was the right approach,’ says Jason. ‘If Dad had got heavy, he’d have alienated me. But he didn’t want to lose his friend: me.’
When Jason’s first child, Jemma, was born, it was love at first sight. ‘Here was another person whose whole being was more important to me than my life. I find it almost impossible to articulate what that felt like.
‘But the problem with having the good fortune to have three healthy kids is the anxiety that kicks in. Now, I pick up a newspaper or turn on the news on TV and I see the world through their eyes. And it frightens me.’
A committed family man, he and Angela finally married in Bali in 2008. Now, when he’s not touring, he divides his time between his two homes, one in west London, the other just outside Oxford, to where he and the family repair most weekends. ‘One of my great joys,’ he says, ‘is mowing the lawn with a glass of Sancerre to hand.’
The cast of Annie Get Your Gun: Norman Pace, Emma Williams and Jason Donovan
For all his erstwhile recklessness, he’s obviously been canny with his hard-earned spoils, putting most of his money into property on the advice of a trusted band of financial advisers. But, ultimately, the person he trusts the most is his wife.
‘Well, Ange is the one who enabled me to get back off my knees. We’re a good team. Our love has grown. It wasn’t an overnight success, you might say. She’s a strong person, the perfect complement to me. We’ve been together for a long time and we’re stronger than ever.
‘The way I like to look at it,’ says Jason Donovan, ‘is that I ended up marrying my best friend.’
Annie Get Your Gun is on national tour; for dates and to book tickets: www.anniegetyourgunthemusical.com
Between The Lines: My Story Uncut by Jason Donovan is published by HarperCollins, priced £11.99.
On the personal front, his private life has been something of a switchback, veering wildly between first love (with Kylie), a wretched period in the 1990s when he fell in with the wrong crowd in the notoriously flesh-eating music business and very nearly didn’t survive, before finally setting down roots with a wife he adores and three children – Jemma is now 14, Zach, 13, and three-year-old Molly – who mean more to him than life itself.
His current sustained contentment is all the more remarkable when you take into account what he calls ‘the car-crash years’. He once said that he’d gone out in 1993 and didn’t really return home until the year 2000.
‘What happened to me was extraordinary at a very young age,’ he says now. ‘I’m not blaming that early success for what happened later. But it was a lot to take on. I was just a boy. What did I know?’
A number of factors conspired to propel him towards the drug habit that all but killed him. When Kylie put an end to their real-life romance – an eerie echo of what their soap characters, Scott and Charlene, had been playing out on screen – Jason was shattered. Nor was his self-esteem boosted when he discovered she’d melted into the arms of Michael Hutchence, bad-boy lead singer with Australian band INXS.
‘My look was so clean-cut, so New Romantic, with all that perfect hair and thick make-up. There was Kurt Cobain in ripped jeans telling us about the truth of life – and I got sucked in. I was keen to mess up my image a little.’ In the process, he all but messed up his life.
The 1990s were not kind to Jason on the personal front as he started appearing in the papers for all the wrong reasons, usually photographed falling out of various dives. Then, in 1995, at the infamous Viper Room in Los Angeles (where actor River Phoenix died on the pavement outside), Jason was attending the 21st birthday party thrown by Johnny Depp for model Kate Moss.
As he recounts in his no-holds-barred autobiography, Between The Lines: ‘My heart was racing, my vision was blurring and I was becoming disorientated. I tried to steady myself but my legs buckled and I fell to the floor.’ Someone called an ambulance and the last person Jason saw, ironically enough, was Michael Hutchence towering over him.
‘But almost the most shocking aspect of all,’ he says today, ‘was that it should have been a wake-up call and yet it wasn’t. That’s the problem with an addiction. You go back in and erase what went before and then carry on doing it all over again. And let me tell you: anyone who says marijuana doesn’t lead on to other drugs is deluded.
Jason and Kylie (Scott and Charlene) in Neighbours (1987)‘Am I the sort of person who would advocate the use of drugs in any way, shape or form? Absolutely not. I’ve been clean for many years now. It just got to the point where it was becoming boring. That’s the only way to describe it. It was time to move on. I saw an opportunity and I grabbed it.’
That opportunity came in the shape of Angela Malloch, stage manager on the touring production of The Rocky Horror Show in which Jason would don high heels and fishnet stockings eight times a week to strut his stuff as Frank N Furter. ‘I’d be backstage waiting to go on and I’d get chatting to Ange.’
The blossoming friendship turned into romance but the relationship hit the buffers and the two of them called it a day. Shortly afterwards, Angela found out she was pregnant. It was ultimatum time. ‘If the relationship had any chance of working, she told me, and if I was going to have any involvement in the life of our child, I would have to get myself back on track. Permanently.’
By now, he was in his early 30s. It was time to take stock, both professionally and personally. ‘You either seize your opportunities or you don’t. And I did. I even gave up smoking, something I found much harder than kicking drugs.’ But, in the end, he says, you’ve got to want to change. ‘Elton John said it and it’s true: nobody can do it for you.’
Tacitly backing his son during these dark days was Terence Donovan, a respected actor in his native Australia. The two are particularly close. When Jason was five, his mother, Sue McIntosh, a TV newscaster, left the marital home. She later remarried and produced three daughters. Jason also has a younger half-brother, Paul, from a subsequent relationship of his father’s.
‘I’ve got a lot of respect for my dad. He’s a big hero of mine.’ When Jason was resolutely going off the rails in the 1990s, Terence took the decision not to come down heavily on him. ‘I think that was the right approach,’ says Jason. ‘If Dad had got heavy, he’d have alienated me. But he didn’t want to lose his friend: me.’
When Jason’s first child, Jemma, was born, it was love at first sight. ‘Here was another person whose whole being was more important to me than my life. I find it almost impossible to articulate what that felt like.
‘But the problem with having the good fortune to have three healthy kids is the anxiety that kicks in. Now, I pick up a newspaper or turn on the news on TV and I see the world through their eyes. And it frightens me.’
A committed family man, he and Angela finally married in Bali in 2008. Now, when he’s not touring, he divides his time between his two homes, one in west London, the other just outside Oxford, to where he and the family repair most weekends. ‘One of my great joys,’ he says, ‘is mowing the lawn with a glass of Sancerre to hand.’
The cast of Annie Get Your Gun: Norman Pace, Emma Williams and Jason DonovanFor all his erstwhile recklessness, he’s obviously been canny with his hard-earned spoils, putting most of his money into property on the advice of a trusted band of financial advisers. But, ultimately, the person he trusts the most is his wife.
‘Well, Ange is the one who enabled me to get back off my knees. We’re a good team. Our love has grown. It wasn’t an overnight success, you might say. She’s a strong person, the perfect complement to me. We’ve been together for a long time and we’re stronger than ever.
‘The way I like to look at it,’ says Jason Donovan, ‘is that I ended up marrying my best friend.’
Annie Get Your Gun is on national tour; for dates and to book tickets: www.anniegetyourgunthemusical.com
Between The Lines: My Story Uncut by Jason Donovan is published by HarperCollins, priced £11.99.