When she returned from America, however, Astrella inadvertently got caught up with the very life she had tried to avoid. So when I was 16, I got a job in a clothing store because it was as far removed from my family life as possible.' I had been living my life like a gipsy, surrounded by drugs and crazy people. His years of drug-taking and womanising left their mark on her to the extent that she went totally the other way. What she didn't want was to repeat her father's mistakes. She says: 'I have always been very opinionated and single-minded about what I want.'

Of all her siblings, Astrella describes herself as 'the goody two-shoes that everybody was always very proud of'. She invited my mother and father and it was the first time they had all been together. Last Thanksgiving was a big stepping stone.

'I've also spent quite a lot of time with Enid. What Dad did was wrong and I would have felt the same. Ione was particularly resentful of him - and quite rightly so. 'There is still a process going on between them and Dad. We got very close and even though it's difficult to see them - because I live in Majorca and they are in America - we try to get together when we can. 'We started off having lunches together, but then spent nearly every day together for about a year-and-a-half. It was nerve-wracking at first and I felt guilty that I'd had our father in my life and they hadn't. 'So, when I was 17, I decided to spend time with Donovan Leitch and Ione in Los Angeles. They came to see us, but it was very difficult.

'Ione said a lot of bad things about Dad in Press articles, so I persuaded him to call them, which he did. Understandably, Ione and Donovan didn't really want to know my dad because he wasn't there for them when he should have been. 'As I got older, I decided the situation was ridiculous and I wanted to know my siblings. 'I was aware of them because I had seen pictures, but we didn't have any contact,' she recalls. She discovered her father had abandoned Enid Karl when their son was a baby and she was pregnant with Ione. Throughout her childhood, Astrella was aware that she had siblings in America, but there was no contact with them. He adopted her son, Julian - the result of her affair with tragic Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones, who drowned in his swimming pool at the age of 27 after a suspected drugs overdose - and the couple had two children of their own, Oriole and Astrella. But by the time he was 24, he was disillusioned and burnt out.'Īt the age of 24, Donovan dropped out of sight and went to live in Ireland with Linda, the woman he calls his 'muse'. In his teens, he was selling out every major stadium in the world. 'He didn't want the same thing happening to me that had happened to him in the Sixties. 'It got a little bit too much too soon, so my father pulled me back,' she recalls. By the age of ten, she was being offered record deals, which her parents declined on her behalf. Her first single, Dream, is being released next month on Donovan Discs - the record label she has set up with her father.Īnd it is instantly clear from talking to her that she is not only creative, but has a sound business head - Astrella and her music manager husband, Jason Rothberg, also have a property company which she can fall back on if her music career doesn't take off.Īt the age of seven, Astrella appeared on stage with her father in front of 50,000 people at a charity telethon in Israel. Having survived the most unconventional of childhoods, she is, today, a beautiful young woman of 34 who is happily married, ready to start a family of her own and about to embark on a music career. Much of the credit for his fragile reconciliation with the splintered parts of his family must go to Astrella. Yet, somehow, the family has survived and, today, Donovan is more likely to be found playing contentedly with his grandchildren than indulging in the excesses of his past. And his other daughter, Astrella Celeste, endured a six-year relationship with her heroin-addicted lover, Paul Ryder, from the rock band Happy Mondays. His youngest daughter, Oriole, from his marriage to Linda Lawrence, became pregnant at 17 and has two children by different fathers. He abandoned his lover, the American model Enid Karl and their two children - Ione Skye (now a film star) and Donovan Leitch (who became a Calvin Klein model) - and was estranged from them for many years. He also left a legacy of dysfunction that deeply affected those who loved him. But it wasn't just his songs that lived on in people's consciousness. He was the ultimate hippy who left behind him a legacy of memorable flower-power songs such as Hurdy Gurdy Man, Mellow Yellow and Jennifer Juniper.įor a few years in the Sixties, Donovan was more famous than the Queen.

Donovan leitch jr