Lily Collins is one budding actress with more than what meets the eye. Aside from coming from a well-known family and building a solid acting career, Collins also has some funny and surprising tales from her childhood.
One of these is that when Collins was much younger, she met several royals, including Princess Diana, and even threw a toy at Prince Charles’s head. She recalled her experiences with the two royals in an interview with James Corden.
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Read more to learn what the Emily in Paris actress said about these experiences and more information about her family and life as a British/American actress.
Collins Has Royal Connections Through Her Father
Collins had those experiences with royals because she met them through her father, famous British musician Phil Collins. Collins is a very successful singer with hit songs including “Another Day in Paradise” and “In the Air Tonight.”
Collins was born to her father’s second wife, an American woman named Jill Tavelman. As a child, she never realized how famous her father was until he took her on a trip to Disneyland.
She spoke about the experience to Radio Times, and it was reported by Daily Mail, who wrote that Collins said, “I was being carried on my Dad’s shoulders when this man started to walk towards us. He had my Dad’s face on his T-shirt and I didn’t quite get it. Then he saw my Dad and asked for a photo – and it was a really weird moment.”
She recalled that at the time, she was confused as to why the man was wearing a shirt with her Dad on it and why she wanted a picture, but with time, she slowly began to understand.
Collins Met Princess Diana And Threw A Toy At Prince Charles
Because of who her father was, Collins met many famous and influential people. She lived in the United Kingdom with her father for several years, and during that time, she even met a few members of the royal family.
In a recent appearance Collins made on The Late Late Show with James Corden, she shared two hilarious stories she was told about when she met Princess Diana and Prince Charles as a child. She was prompted by a picture Corden showed of her at an event with the royals as a child.
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Collins said, “That’s my mom and my Dad and I, and it’s a Prince’s Trust event. I’m giving Diana flowers, but the second she went to take them, I then tried to pull them back. So, as you can imagine, all the air was sucked out of the room. But then again, I was wearing a cute dress, so who’s going to really punish me there?”
Her second story was about her first interaction with Prince Charles. She said, “I was also told that when I was younger, I was playing with some toys with Prince Charles and I proceeded to kind of throw something at him – like, throw a toy telephone at his head, which again, all the air was sucked out of the room.”
Collins Sees Herself As More British Than American
Collins lived in the United Kingdom until 1996, when her parents divorced. She and her mother then moved to Los Angeles. In a video Wired posted in 2019, Collins spoke about her dual citizenship and stated that she still considers herself more British than American.
Because of her time in the UK, Collins also once had a British accent, but after moving to LA and being teased for how she sounded, she deliberately adopted an American accent to fit in better at school.
She Lost Her Accent And Had To Relearn It
When Collins moved to America and started school, her classmates teased her a lot for how she sounded and pronounced certain words. Because of this, she decided to blend in better by dropping her British accent. She did this by watching “Peter Pan” repeatedly and copying how the characters talked.
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Eventually, she was successful and lost her natural British accent. Many of the actress’s fans believe that she was born in the US. Years later, she told MSN that she wished she still had her British accent and regretted training her voice to lose her British accent.
