Jason Donovan: Surviving soaps, drugs and stardom

Oct 10 2007 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

Jason Donovan has enjoyed the dream and suffered the trauma that brings some stars crashing down. Now he has revealed all in his biography. Emma Pinch reports

CLAD only in his multi-coloured Joseph coat and a pair of fluffy white sports socks, Jason Donovan surveyed himself in the mirror.

The grey light of dawn was breaking outside and he was coming down after yet another night wired on cocaine.

“‘Is this really me?’ I thought,” says Jason. “It was the time I decided I’d had enough.”

The ex-Neighbours star had started taking coke in the early ’90s, nothing unusual among the showbiz circle he moved in. But by the late ’90s his addiction was killing him.

Catapulted to fame in his teens playing clean-cut Scott Robinson in Aussie soap Neighbours, his subsequent on and off-screen romance with Kylie Minogue cemented his position as the golden boy of girls’ magazines.

Post-Neighbours and following a pop career shifting millions of records, he carved out a place for himself in the West End, playing Joseph in Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and then Frank N Furter in the Rocky Horror Show.

He seemed to have everything. But, in the era of Nirvana and heroin chic, the one commodity Jason Donovan didn’t have was cool.

“I was fighting this Peter Pan image that I didn’t think I was,” says Jason, now 39.

“I wanted to move on from the boy in Smash Hits to something more edgy.

“I was only 17 when I walked into a show which changed my life, straight out of school. I was making up for some of that time and I wanted to be a little reckless. It’s the classic pop star thing.

“I was trying to be something I wasn’t.”

He moved on from doing drugs with the showbiz crowd to locking himself in his apartment to hoover up “grams and grams” on wild benders. Even meeting the love of his life, Angela Mulloch, who was part of the stage management in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the plunging come-downs, the fits, the seizures and the nosebleeds weren’t enough to make him give up.

“After a while, you begin to know the drug and how it works best,” he says. “Maybe that’s one of the downsides. That habit of scoring and going home and getting high and thinking you are creative and doing things round the house, like art and music, because I had a studio in my house. I don’t know how good it was, though.

“With that sort of abuse and addiction, you keep going on to cover up pain. Life is about dealing with things when times are difficult. It’s not every day you rise with a smile on your face, so to escape it I took more coke.”

When his daughter, Jemma, was born in 2000, Angela issued an ultimatum – they could not be together while he was using. It was the trigger he needed.

“Being around Jemma was a bigger buzz than snorting coke,” he says. “I thought if I can’t change this now I’ll never get the opportunity to do it, so I seized a moment and that’s something I’m extremely proud of.

“Drugs get boring after a while. Humans are basically built the same, we all get bored of various things and I just sort of thought, ‘how many sleepless nights do I want, this is dull. Let’s go and scare myself with a bit of reality’”.

Jason’s stint in the I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here jungle last year, where his sunny outlook and laid-back Aussie humour won him a new generation of fans, was, he explains, a “strategic” move to propel him back into the limelight.

“It wasn’t happening musically and me sitting in Birmingham at the Birmingham Rep doing theatre doesn’t reach many people,” he says. “I hoped to capture that pop cycle once again, like where people pulled out their Take That records. It was an opportunity to reach a prime-time audience and get back into people’s minds, and to a certain degree it’s really worked, and it’s been a bloody good year. The book’s been pretty good.”

When Jason announced his autobiography, it sparked feverish speculation of a steamy exposé of his time with Kylie – who later dumped him for INXS rocker Michael Hutchence.

It isn’t, of course – but he isn’t coy about his relationship with her, saying being dumped “was tough at the time” but the relationship had run its course.