Malcolm McDowell Says Daughter-in-Law Lily Collins Has …

Malcolm McDowell thinks highly of his daughter-in-law Lily Collins

While speaking about his upcoming movie Last Train to Fortune with PEOPLE, the actor, 81, took a moment to praise Collins, 35, who married his son Charlie in September 2021.

“Lily is absolutely a star. I’m in awe of her work. I think she’s one of the best young actresses around,” he says. “I love watching her — she’s got that Audrey Hepburn kind of thing going, which is indefinable in a way, but it’s there.”

Collins, an actress and daughter of musician Phil Collins, first began dating Charlie, 41, in 2019. The pair announced their engagement in September 2021 and tied the knot the following year.
“There’s a sort of light that shines behind the eyes somehow. She’s really fantastic,” McDowell says of the Emily in Paris star. “And she’s just like that, by the way — when you meet her, she’s what you meet and what you see is what you get. She’s delightful.”

McDowell’s son Charlie, a filmmaker and screenwriter, is best known for his work on movies like 2022’s Windfall and work on television series like Legion and Dipsatches from Elsewhere.

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“They’re both wonderful people,” McDowell says. “I don’t see enough of them. They live in Europe a lot of the time, so I don’t really see them that much, but when I see them, it’s always great to just hang.”

Charlie is McDowell’s son with his ex-wife Steenburgen, 71; the former couple also share an older daughter, Lilly Walton, who is an actor-turned-interior designer. McDowell also shares three sons with his wife Kelley Kuhr, whom he married in 1991.

McDowell’s upcoming movie Last Train to Fortune, in which he costars with the late Bill Paxton’s son James Paxton, Bernadette Peters, Laura Marano and his ex-wife Mary Steenburgen, is expected to release this fall.

The movie features McDowell as a schoolteacher in post-Civil War America who travels across the Old West to take up a new job in a new town. When he misses his train, he meets up with an outlaw (Paxton, 30) and they travel together; the film places an importance on the power of reading and education through literature, which the actor tells PEOPLE meant a great deal to him.

“We’re talking [about] a time when there was no communication whatsoever except by one-sheet newspapers or something,” he says. “Of course, no radio, no anything. So books become absolutely the mainstay of your life.”