Jill Tavelman turned 70 in April. The following month, she was at Buckingham Palace for a party marking the 50th anniversary of The King’s Trust, held on May 14, 2026. It rained through most of the afternoon. Her ex-husband, Phil Collins, was there too, making one of the few public appearances he has made since revealing serious health problems earlier this year. The two of them got a few private minutes with King Charles that afternoon.
Tavelman was married to the Genesis frontman from 1984 to 1996, and is the mother of actress Lily Collins. She and Collins are now working together on a King’s Trust benefit auction in London this November, donating items she has described as their personal archives. Thirty years after the divorce, she is choosing to be publicly tied to him again.
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A marriage that ended in 1996
Tavelman, born in Los Angeles in 1956, met Collins at the Rainbow Bar in Hollywood in 1980. They dated for four years and married in 1984, not long after his first marriage, to Andrea Bertorelli, had ended. Their daughter, Lily Jane Collins, now known for Netflix’s Emily in Paris, was born on March 18, 1989, in Guildford, England.
The marriage broke down after Collins reconnected with his former fiancรฉe, Lavinia Lang, while touring in 1992. Tavelman moved back to Los Angeles with Lily, then five, and the divorce was finalized in 1996. Collins later said he had been “a bit of a bastard” to her.
She has never remarried.
What she built instead
Tavelman has worked as a schoolteacher and served as president of the Beverly Hills Women’s Club. In 2014, once Lily’s acting career was established, she opened Waverly on Doheny, a shop near the Troubadour theater in West Hollywood that sells what she calls “resurrected oddities”: vintage cameras, old typewriters, letters pulled from estate sales.
She told The Hollywood Reporter in 2019 that the idea came from a habit she never grew out of. “I just didn’t understand the concept of throwing things away,” she said. At one estate sale, she watched workers cut the stamps off a stack of old love letters and throw the letters themselves away. She asked if she could have them instead.
On Instagram, where the shop has built a following past 26,000, the account runs under the name “Jill Collins,” not Jill Tavelman.
Thirty years of not quite letting go
In August 2024, on what would have been her fortieth wedding anniversary, Tavelman posted on Instagram calling it a “bittersweet day.” Not the anniversary of the divorce. The wedding.
Earlier this month, on the 41st anniversary of Live Aid, she wrote that she still owns the outfit she wore boarding a Concorde flight with Collins in 1985, along with her event laminate from that day.
Her father was a Jewish immigrant from Canada who ran a well-known clothing store in the Los Angeles area, according to a 2012 profile in the Cleveland Jewish News. He had died by the time it was published. Tavelman told The Hollywood Reporter that her mother, Jane, once danced with Don Loper, the performer turned designer behind the Beverly Hills Hotel’s banana leaf wallpaper. Jane was born in 1925 and died around 2006. Tavelman still posts a birthday tribute to her every year.
In January 2025, Tavelman became a grandmother for the first time. Lily Collins and her husband, filmmaker Charlie McDowell, welcomed a daughter, Tove Jane McDowell, born via surrogate.
A different kind of year
In January 2026, Collins revealed that he now needs live-in nursing care, tied to a spinal injury from 2007 and a series of knee surgeries. He has largely stayed out of public life since retiring from music in 2022. Rod Stewart and his wife, Penny Lancaster, were also at the Palace that day.
Jill Tavelman wrote afterward that she and Collins were “very proud and honored to be there and have a few private moments with King Charles, who seemed genuinely pleased to see Phil.”
The auction is scheduled for November 19, 2026, in London, through Julien’s Auctions, three decades after their divorce.
