Sound of Music set to become one of Jason’s favourite things

JASON Donovan is coming to Leeds with The Sound of Music. Nick Ahad spoke to the former pop star.

“I DON’T make great copy these days,” says Jason Donovan, with more than a hint of mischief.

“The media is interested only in the spectrum from when you’re up to when you’re down. They’re not interested in the in-between,” says Donovan, a man who knows a thing or two about ups and downs.

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“The truth is I have had a lot of middle ground in my life, but people don’t hear about that.”

The ups came early on for Donovan, when he was one half of the Scott and Charlene relationship on Aussie soap Neighbours that captured the hearts and minds of people from Melbourne to Malton. “It was amazing to be in a show that meant so much to so many people’s lives. We were on five days a week, regularly getting 20 million viewers. Those characters really resonated across the world, all across Europe as well as in Australia and that was my birth into the world of fame.”

It was an easy birth, but a difficult childhood. Worldwide recognition followed for the soap star who became a pop star and then more famous for a string of controversies from suing The Face magazine when it ran an article which suggested he was gay to highly publicised drug use. Three years after suing the magazine, he made headlines by going into a seizure at Kate Moss’s 21st birthday party at the Viper Room in Los Angeles – the club where River Phoenix had died two years earlier.

Donovan did not shy away from talking about those dark days – he became a master of the confessional interview and in 2007 released a no-holds-barred autobiography.

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“It’s not something I’m proud of, but all of that stuff is part of me, part of my make up, so there’s no point being dishonest about it,” he says.

That may be, but he was painfully honest about all the bad stuff.

“I just never believed in being dishonest about any of it. It is who I am,” he insists.

These days Donovan’s time is taken up looking after his young family with his wife Angela. They have an eight-week-old baby girl Molly in the house, as well as Jemma, 11 and Zac, 10.

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It means it is difficult to leave home, but he will be travelling North next week when he appears as Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music. Having played successful runs in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Joseph and His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat and The War Of The Worlds, Donovan says that a production has to be of high quality if it is to take him away from his family.

“I don’t want to appear in something just for the sake of it. I pick projects that are good, that are something I can be proud of,” he says. “And I’m definitely proud of this.”

The Sound of Music, Leeds Grand Theatre, June 7-25. 0844 848 2705.

THE HIGHS AND LOWS OF JASON

HIGHS:

* 1987, Award for playing Scott in Neighbours.

* 1989: First UK Number One with Too Many Broken Hearts.

* 2006: Third in I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.

LOWS:

* 1992 Sues The Face.

* 1995: Collapses following a drugs overdose.