Ione Skye on surviving teen stardom and reconnecting with her dad

Hollywood star Ione Skye has just finished a podcast and is settling in for the evening at the home she shares Down Under with her Australian musician husband Ben Lee and their 15-year-old daughter Goldie when P.S. calls.

Her first-born Kate, 23, whom she had with David Netto, is at university in Sydney, not far from Ione’s remodelled Victorian home in upmarket Paddington. And having just finished filming Anaconda, with Paul Rudd and Jack Black, Ione is aiming to make the wrap party.

It’s a scene of domestic harmony and a far cry from her heart-achingly raw coming-of-age memoir Say Everything. A tale of movie, rock and supermodel royalty and of chasing fame in the shadow of an absent-but-famous Scottish father, it is dedicated to the island where she was conceived and after which she was named – Skye.

Ione, the 16-year-old Hollywood starlet who shot to fame as the dream girl inspiration for John Cusack’s iconic boombox serenade in the hit 1989 film Say Anything, is the daughter of 1960s Glasgow folk legend Donovan.

Scotland is in her blood.

So, it comes as little surprise when the star – who on a media merry-go-round of interviews has “just done” her pal Drew Barrymore’s show – tells us: “I am so proud of Scotland. I have been really looking forward to this one.”

Maryhill-born singer-songwriter Donovan, now 78, was said in the 1960s to be more famous than the Queen. He left behind him hit flower-power songs like Hurdy Gurdy Man and Mellow Yellow, along with a trail of heartache. He left his American model partner Enid Karl and their two children, son Donovan (Dono) and daughter Ione, for his muse-turned-wife Linda Lawrence, leaving the children to grow up without him.

Finally reunited, Ione reveals for the first time their reunion at her kilted brother’s wedding on the banks of Loch Lomond and rediscovering her Scottish roots. The tell-all autobiography also lifts the lid on her Tinseltown climb to fame at age 15, when she sought solace from co-stars Keanu Reeves, River Phoenix, Matthew Perry and Robert Downey Jr. It also describes her relationship, at the age of 16, with 24-year-old heroin addict and Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis, and the abortion he paid for after getting her pregnant.

She opens her heart about her marriage at 21 to Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz, destroyed by her extra-marital flings with ’90s “bad girls” Jenny Shimizu, Alice Temple and Madonna’s ex Ingrid Casares. And she tells how she cried herself to sleep after the death in 1993 of 23-year-old Phoenix – who she’d known from 13. She also reveals the final text message sent to her by friend and former lover Matthew Perry before his death in 2023.

Ione with Jennifer Aniston in Dream for an Insomniac.

Skye – who made her debut alongside Keanu Reeves in the 1986 crime movie River’s Edge – admits the launch of the book was “emotional”. “I felt quite vulnerable. I didn’t want to hurt people,” including her dad, she admits.

“The New York Times reached out to him, and he gave the sweetest quote, something like ‘I’m proud of her’. I’m going to send him a personalised copy of the book. I was nervous about it, but I think he will be OK if he reads it.”

Ione, who is close to her half-sisters Astrella and Oriole, notably opens her memoir with a description of a picture taken of her parents and baby brother on the Scottish island she cherishes. But she adds: “By the time I was conceived in Donovan’s gypsy caravan on the Isle of Skye, he was already drifting back to his ex-girlfriend Linda Lawrence. Then my father left Mom for good, having won Linda back from Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones” (whose son Julian was later adopted by Donovan).

Her mother, she says, never truly got over it. Apart from paying child support and asking that Ione take a paternity test – which she refused – contact was virtually non-existent, she says. Living in Hollywood and watching her friend Karis – daughter of Marsha Hunt and rock legend Mick Jagger – develop a relationship with Mick after the couple split made Ione think “more and more” about her own father.

It wasn’t until the summer she filmed Say Anything, when her brother “Dono” (who became a Calvin Klein model) discovered Donovan was living only 140 miles from their LA home, that she met him for the first time. Recalling how he walked towards them strumming a guitar, she writes: “I stepped forward and embraced my father across his guitar. He stopped playing and, after a moment, returned the hug.” She adds: “I’m touching my father for the very first time, I told myself, breathing him in.”

It was there she learned that her half-sisters didn’t know of her and Dono’s existence until it was revealed by her Scottish grandparents, Donald and Winnie.

“My father’s parents were very interested in us,” she says. “It was very sweet. Even though it was complicated, they reached out.

“My father grew up in Glasgow, but they had a place in the country, where we visited. We loved it. We swam in freezing rivers in our underwear with our cousins. It was the coldest I’d ever been, and it was summer,” she laughs.

“We knew about our half-sisters, but they didn’t know about us. My grandparents had pictures from this trip and my half-sisters were like: ‘Who are these kids?’, and they said: ‘That’s your brother and sister!’ They were like: ‘What!’ We are close now and we look so alike. It’s fun.”

But she didn’t invite Donovan to her wedding with Adam Horovitz in 1992, later learning he was hurt by it. He was, though, invited to Dono’s wedding to Scottish model Kirsty Hume at Luss Parish Church on the banks of Loch Lomond in 1997, which was attended by mononymous supermodel icons including Shalom, Stella, Amber and Helena.

Ione, a bridesmaid, remembers joining her dad on the ferry to Cameron House. She told him: “I think Dono and the boys are true,” suggesting, with a grin, that they were ‘going commando’ under their kilts, and asked: “‘No kilt for you?” She says he joked: ‘I thought enough pairs of hairy legs would be here already!’” They were later thrust together for a father-daughter dance that didn’t quite happen.

Five years ago, Ione, Ben and Goldie, then aged 10, went to visit Donovan and Linda at their pink mansion in Ireland, a “candlelit, tapestry-strewn home… straight out of Harry Potter, with logs crackling in the fireplace, tarot cards on the kitchen table, and views of wild ponies grazing on acres of green,” she writes, revealing that her daughter thought they were wizards.

Today, Ione has made her peace with her father’s absence but still has questions. “It’s funny, when I am with him, I just seem to understand,” she tells P.S. “Sure, he could have been a more of a straightforward father and it is confusing to me. I don’t agree with his parenting of me or lack of it, but I kind of just get into his whole vibe when I’m with him because he is an amazing guy.

“He is poetic, and fascinating, and I feel so proud of him and think he should be in a bigger space in the group of musicians of that time.”

She adds: “It has been a journey. Now that he is getting older it’s a new anxiety. I want to hang out more with my dad, he’s going to be 80 soon.

“In that trip I wrote about, he was in Ireland. I want to ask him why not Scotland. My grandparents were in Scotland until they passed away. I still have so many questions…”

‘My kids won’t do what I did’

Ione Skye says she was pitched in her teens into the roles of “breadwinner and babysitter” and wishes she’d left older partner Anthony Kiedis sooner, perhaps avoiding the need for HIV tests (that were negative) and her abortion at 17, which she went through alone after he dropped her off at the clinic.

“I don’t know if it was just in the entertainment business but it was normal then for teens to be with people 10 or 15 years older.”

She’s discussed this with friend Drew Barrymore, who also dated older men. “We don’t understand how it affected us yet,” Ione says. “But I know if my 15-year-old a year from now dates somebody in their 20s, it would be weird. My kids are making better choices than I did.”

The deaths of River Phoenix and Matthew Perry were crushing but she believes she survived Hollywood thanks to directors who treated her responsibly and with respect, and also her caring mum, who despite depression was devoted.

“We had an open relationship. If I needed to come home when the s*** hit the fan, she would be there for me,” she says.

Ione is looking to the future: “Working with Jack Black and Paul Rudd on Anaconda, which comes out at Christmas, was great. It was a dream job, and I want more of those…”

Say Everything: A Memoir by Ione Skye is published by HarperCollins UK