Moments: Living Under the Spotlight | Jason Donovan & Amanda de Cadenet

Episode Description: In this episode of Begin Again Moments, two powerful conversations explore the hidden cost of life in the public eye. Jason Donovan and Amanda de Cadenet reflect on the intense scrutiny that comes with fame, sharing the personal impact of media attention, public judgement and press intrusion. Together, they reveal what it takes to protect your identity, your relationships and your peace when your life is constantly under the spotlight. To hear the full conversations, watch the complete episodes on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:02Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:01Speaker 03

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• 1:29Speaker 04

  I think for anybody kind of of later generations watching this or listening to this might be interested to hear what press intrusion was like

• 1:39Speaker 04

  back when you were famous.

• 1:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:41Speaker 04

  What, because you actually ended up leaving the UK because it was just too much with John.

• 1:46Speaker 05

  I did.

• 1:47Speaker 04

  What was it like before you left? How bad was it? Can you give us some kind of examples?

• 1:52Speaker 05

  I mean, for a young person, at the time, I was, I was, I had Atlanta, my daughter at 19. And I think the combination of a member of Duran Duran being married to, you know, television presenter Amanda de Cadenet was just like a match made in tabloid heaven. The combination of us was very intense. And Atlanta was less than a year old. And the media was so brutal about my body post-pregnancy. And there was the worst photos of me.

• 2:27Speaker 04

  Really? I mean, you can't imagine that.

• 2:28Speaker 05

  And headlines, you know, Amanda de Flabane. And just like horrible, horrible body shaming. And I remember I was breastfeeding in the park by where I lived. And not like with my boobs out, like discreetly breastfeeding. And I guess paparazzi got photos of those pictures and put them on blast.

• 2:47Speaker 04

  And just to say, so people know, you couldn't, you never saw the paparazzi.

• 2:53Speaker 05

  No.

• 2:53Speaker 04

  You didn't know that they were taking pictures.

• 2:55Speaker 05

  No, I had no clue.

• 2:55Speaker 04

  Because people would go like, oh, well, they knew.

• 2:57Speaker 05

  You don't know.

• 2:58Speaker 04

  You don't know. They are brilliant at hiding.

• 3:00Speaker 05

  Really good at it.

• 3:01Speaker 04

  And they can take them from miles away.

• 3:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it was, it was bad enough that I was, I was telling Ella, my daughter, because I walked past my old house that I used to live in. And I said, "That's where I used to live", with John in Atlanta. And I said, "You know, I left this lovely house in Notting Hill with food in the fridge and laundry in the hamper." And I, I said to him, "I've got to get out of here. I can't take this." And we went on a, on a holiday to LA, and I never went back.

• 3:30Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 3:30Speaker 05

  And so my house had to get packed up and shipped to Los Angeles. And I didn't come back here for 10 years.

• 3:36Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 3:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's such a shame. It's such a shame because, you know, there's so many wonderful things about being here and so many old friends. And my career, I left my career. Like, I really just like got up and left. And it's only kind of through all the work that I've done, all the different therapies that I've done, you know, that I've been able to kind of heal a lot of that, that pain from that period of time when I, when I used to live here, you know?

• 4:07Speaker 04

  How, how much did having Atlanta help you?

• 4:12Speaker 04

  Like, it feels like you withstood horrific amounts of press intrusion.

• 4:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, I did.

• 4:19Speaker 04

  But then you had Atlanta, and it was like, okay, not okay anymore.

• 4:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was just done for me.

• 4:24Speaker 04

  What was it about having Atlanta that changed everything?

• 4:27Speaker 05

  I think having a daughter at 19 allowed me to get my focus off of myself and onto someone else, which is always helpful. It's so unhealthy to be a person who has that much attention on them. Because then you're focusing on yourself to such a degree that like, that's all you think about. And so to have Atlanta and to be able to think about someone else and to want to protect her and take care of her in a way that like I didn't feel like I had had. And I just didn't want anyone photographing her.

• 5:02Speaker 04

  That's so nice.

• 5:06Speaker 00

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• 5:34Speaker 01

  Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them? That's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand", when leads were slow. Yeah, it, it wasn't.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 6:05Speaker 06

  It was a difficult one for me, though, Davina, at the time, because that was also coming off the back of when I seen the face. And I think there was a lot of hostility.

• 6:16Speaker 04

  Can we talk about that?

• 6:17Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 6:17Speaker 04

  I think it's important to talk about it because it was a big thing at the time for you. They did something terrible, I think.

• 6:24Speaker 06

  What happened was, you know, to contextualize the whole thing was that outing was a campaign that really began in America, New York specifically, by militant activists sort of wanting to out prominent politicians specifically who were legislating against gay rights at the time. Fair enough.

• 6:49Speaker 04

  Fair enough.

• 6:50Speaker 06

  And, you know, set the board sort of equal. I think it sort of shifted focus to include celebrities like Tom Cruise, Whitney Houston. It went across the pond. And of course, Jason Donovan, Joseph, Blunt and Palladium. Quite an easy target. Coats, speculation had always surfaced about the blond-haired, blue-eyed kid, you know? You know, which is probably sort of my fault, sort of in a way, by trying to keep my private life private. But it was my sort of decision. What, what became sort of the thing about that which sort of really got my nerve

• 7:34Speaker 06

  was a doctored photo I'd taken in the 80s in, in Australia, in a white t-shirt, in good faith for some, I think it was actually for a photographer's exhibition, actually, was then put into a newsagent and used by these campaigners. And it was doctored. And on the words on the front were, "Jason Donovan, queer as fuck", and "out" put on it. And that poster was strategically put throughout London, specifically near news outlets so that those journalists would walk past it and go, "Wow, what the hell is that?"

• 8:16Speaker 06

  And again, this was to try and raise the profile. Fast forward to the face. The face sort of fall victim, fell victim, rather, to, to that and then decided to report on it. Now, a lot of tabloid newspapers, you know, avoided it like the plague because they knew it was litigious, you know? The face had the option to contact me. They decided not to contact me. And the issue really came down to the article itself suggesting that I was lying about my sexuality, and I wasn't. And they printed the picture without me giving me the option to at least have my say.

• 8:59Speaker 06

  The judge, you know, rightly said, they said, "Well, we couldn't get in contact." He went, "Give me a fucking break", you know? He's in and out of the stage door. You know, you send a letter.

• 9:13Speaker 06

  But it was a tough one for me because, you know, I felt, you know, I felt empowered in the sense that, you know, whether you're gay, straight, black, white, whatever you are, no one has the right to publicize their ideology, or not ideology, the ideas,

• 9:34Speaker 06

  using you as bait when they don't really have your permission or support.

• 9:40Speaker 04

  And with a doctored photograph, which seems incredibly unfair.

• 9:44Speaker 06

  You know, do I, do I feel about, you know, I think it was Nick Logan, who was the publisher. Cheryl Garrett was the journalist. You know, do I feel good about what probably I put them through? Not really. But I guess at the end of the day, you have to really stand up for your right and what you believe is right.

• 10:12Speaker 04

  As somebody in your business or our business of being well-known, when, I sued a couple of times, but it was a line that I needed to draw to say, "Look, you can say kind of whatever you like about me. That's not true, and I get that all the time. But when it's something bad that I'm really upset about, I will say something."

• 10:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 10:38Speaker 04

  Or I will take action.

• 10:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  And then I think it sets a precedent that people go, "Actually, we'd better not say that. Or we can go, we can say something that he won't really mind that's not quite true." But I think, I think the difficult thing for you was that...

• 10:57Speaker 04

  Often it would be a tabloid paper and everybody's used to them being, but this was the face.

• 11:04Speaker 06

  On the edge, yeah, it was. And it snookered really my next sort of career. Whether I was ready to sort of grow up and, and, and move into the face. You really need the product probably to be able to go from smash hits to the faces. You know, I struggled a bit with that, but I, it didn't, it didn't help my mental health. And, and, and I, and I took this action and it sort of bit me a little bit. But my intention was for those people to stand up, for those people, you know, who didn't want to be misrepresented and didn't have the public profile and the money. And to go, no, no, that's not right.

• 11:48Speaker 06

  That's not fucking right. And I was right.

• 11:51Speaker 04

  You were right.

• 11:51Speaker 06

  I went through pain and suffering because now that wouldn't happen.

• 11:55Speaker 04

  No.

• 11:55Speaker 06

  It just would not happen.

• 11:58Speaker 04

  No.

• 11:59Speaker 06

  But in those days, it was, there was still, it's like a cat trying to get its, you know, it was still trying to.

• 12:07Speaker 04

  It was the Wild West.

• 12:08Speaker 06

  It was the Wild West. And, and gay rights and legislation and, you know, the pink paper and, and I, I, I hope now the world's in some parts is, is very different.

• 12:25Speaker 04

  It's better for the gay community for sure.

• 12:27Speaker 06

  Definitely, definitely. But in some parts of the world, it's not.

• 12:30Speaker 04

  It's not, yeah. But in the, in the UK, we've made great advances.

• 12:34Speaker 06

  And maybe, hopefully, maybe, maybe, maybe I might've made a tiny little bit of a contribution in a sort of weird way to that, maybe.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

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