Why at age 90, Joan Collins is working as hard as ever

Here is my theory: Dame Joan Collins may not swagger among the pantheon of Britain’s greatest actors, but her acting was good enough to harm her. Snatched from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for starletdom by the Rank Organisation aged 17 – and now, at 90, still hard at work – two roles define her. The first is nymphomaniac businesswoman Fontaine Khaled from The Stud (1978) and The Bitch (1979), the latter bearing the title that follows Collins like an invisible chat-show chyron. The other role, obviously, is Alexis Colby, the vengeance-is-hers ex-wife of oil tycoon Blake Carrington in Dynasty (1981-89). Poor Dame Joan, an actor nailed to infamy by her own excellence.

The Joan Collins story is a survivor’s tale. Credit: Stuart McClymont/News Licensing/Headpress

Her reputation precedes her and I am ready to greet it. Were the real Collins not to prove something of a diva, I’d be disappointed. In fact, she uses the word while innocently praising her fifth and current husband, Percy Gibson, whom she married 21 years ago.

“He’s been a company manager since he was 19,” she says. “So he’s used to dealing with actors and producers and directors and divas.“

So he knows how to handle her?

“Now, what do you mean by that?”

I don’t mean anything.

“Oh yes you do. Come on!”

It is a joke, I plead, explaining that I think people confuse her with the villains she has played so vividly. No one, I add, assumed that Larry Hagman, the antihero of Dynasty’s rival soap, Dallas, was a JR in real life.

“I know,” she says, “because he’s a man”. And Collins is all woman. Her face seems to be made of exquisitely carved marshmallow – carved, I hasten to add, by its cheekbones rather than a scalpel, and preserved by her own-brand foundation and a vampiric avoidance of sunlight. She walks briskly, elegantly, without sticks. She is 90 going on 35.

The Joan Collins story is a survivor’s tale, of course, but also a repeat-loop saga of its heroine being chiselled out of money by studios, producers and publishers. Collins keeps a flat in London, an apartment in Los Angeles and a villa in the south of France, but I think she is entitled to our sympathies and certainly her residences, which she has only because she still earns.

In October, for example, she begins a months-long stage tour in the UK which will mine her extensive anecdotal seams. The tour follows the publication of her latest memoir and shares its name, Behind the Shoulder Pads.

“They used to call me the ostrich. I might get upset for an hour, or even a day, but then I bury my head in the sand and I get on with my life.”

JOAN COLLINS

Does she keep working because she thinks she will die if she stops? “I work,” she explains, as if to a simpleton, “because I have to make a living”.

Dynasty faced ratings death before Collins joined the cast. It recovered immediately and was soon out-trashing Dallas, yet producers and cast were loath to credit her with the recovery. They increased her pay but cut down her appearances.

Linda Evans, who played the second Mrs Carrington, wasn’t just cool towards Collins but, Collins claims, “accidentally” socked her for real during a fight scene in a lily pond. Even 20 years later, when the pair toured in a play, the animosity had not faded. Entries in Collins’ recent My Unapologetic Diaries include, “She gives me an almighty shove that sends me flying onto my knees,” and, “My finger is in agony because Linda kicked it last night.” Evans’ spokesperson denied the allegations and Evans said in a recent interview, “Well, it isn’t me or how I am. But that’s okay. I’ve learnt that everyone gets to have their own perception of how life is”.

Yet Collins is not short of women friends. The great villains in her life have been men, and even some of her heroes took liberties. Filming the 1986 miniseries Sins, Gene Kelly weaponised a love scene in order, she writes, to “thrust his tongue deep into my mouth”.

Collins’ agelessness makes it easy to forget she hails from a time when misogyny was unremarkable because it was tolerated. Her father was a misogynist, she says, but “all men” born at the beginning of the 20th century were. And he was unfaithful, but, “All men were during the war, apparently”.

That does not mean women did not get hurt. She wrote in her 1978 memoir, Past Imperfect, that after her sister Jackie’s birth, when Collins was four, her father withdrew his affection. Her early infatuations with older men were attempts to compensate. Does she still think that? “No. I think that was something I did to pad out the book.”

No one admits to such things, I say. “I’m not a very analytical person, Andrew,” she replies. “They used to call me the ostrich. I might get upset for an hour, or even a day, but then I bury my head in the sand and I get on with my life. That might make me sound frivolous or shallow, but life is not a bowl of cherries. Life is a bowl of cherry pips and I’ve had quite a few, particularly in the husband department.”

Oh yes, Joan Collins’ husband department – actually a department store famed for its damaged goods. Her first purchase was Maxwell Reed, a matinee idol 14 years her senior. When they met, it was date rape. He picked her up in his Bentley at Bayswater Tube station; she thought they were going to a club. He drove her to his flat, where he proffered a Scotch and Coke laced with something narcotic while he bathed. When she awoke, she threw up and realised sex had occurred. “Did you like it?” he asked. Reader, she married him.

“It’s still normal life. I am only occasionally stopped. Then I just say, ‘No, I’m not doing any autographs.’ I wear a baseball cap and glasses.”

JOAN COLLINS

The marriage lasted seven months, ending when Reed suggested she augment his savings by sleeping with a rich sheikh he had lined up. When they divorced, he demanded alimony on the rubbish grounds that he had “discovered” her. “They all got money out of me, actually,” she says of her ex-husbands. The exception was her third, when “there was no money left”.

But he was later. After Reed, she counted among her boyfriends the youthfully spotty Warren Beatty, by whom she became pregnant. He duly arranged an abortion. When Shirley MacLaine later asked what her brother, the famous lothario, was like in bed, Collins replied: “Overrated”.

Back in London she fell under the spell of Anthony Newley, a gifted writer and singer. In 1963, they married. They had two children: Tara, a writer and producer, and Alexander, a painter. He was not faithful to her, but in 1969 decided to work out his issues through an X-rated art movie in which Collins played the protagonist’s wife while a blonde Playboy model was the object of his deepest lust. The film was as bad as their marriage had become.

Her next marriage, in 1972, was to Ron Kass, an American music executive. In a career lull, she chose to experiment with being what was called a housewife. At their semi-detached house in north London, her children were soon joined by a new sister, Katyana. Collins has called the years from 1970 to 1975 “almost perfect” – she even cooked “spaghetti bolognese or stews”. No longer well known, she could travel into town without being bothered.

Joan Collins and her husband Percy Gibson during the Platinum Jubilee Pageant outside Buckingham Palace in London, in June 2022.Credit: AP

So she has known normal life? “It’s still normal life,” she says. “I am only occasionally stopped. Then I just say, ‘No, I’m not doing any autographs.’ I wear a baseball cap and glasses.”

Kass, however, lost his London job and they all moved to Hollywood, where his company ran up debts. “Ron, unfortunately, became the victim of drugs and that’s why I was so anti-drug,” she says. “But I won’t go any further than that because we have a daughter.” Katyana is a mother herself and has escaped press attention.

Collins reserves the strongest vitriol in her memoirs for husband number four, Peter Holm, a handsome one-hit wonder Swedish pop singer she writes off as an “obdurate dullard and calculating sociopath” who gaslit her and played the tyrant. Wed in a “tacky” Las Vegas chapel in 1985, they divorced two years later.

There followed Robin Hurlstone, a tall, blond, green-eyed actor – and another major disappointment. Hurlstone did not “take to” her sister or her older daughter and, to their relief, Collins never married him.

Given her experience of rotters, I wonder whether she can explain what women see in Boris Johnson. Did he charm her? “It takes a lot to charm me.” Theatre producer Percy Gibson, who met Collins while toiling on a play she was touring in America, did. His devotion has not wavered from the day in 2000 when he offered to run out to a shop in San Diego to buy her eyeliner and returned with a mascara wand instead. Collins exclaimed, with what reads like relief: “I guess you are not gay.” He was 36 then, 58 now. “Love has no limits,” she says.

So much has been written about Collins, and so much of it by her, I need to inquire whether the new book and stage show have anything left to reveal. “I’ll give you one hint,” she says. “I think the chapter is called ‘Who Is It?’ and it’s about when my sister was born and how angry I was and how I hated her, how I tried to kill her.”

As adults, the novelist and the actor (although Joan writes novels, too) also had their differences, but by the time of Jackie’s death from breast cancer in 2015 they were close. Had Jackie told her she was dying? “I knew, but even if you know, it’s still tragic. My baby sister dies, and from something that she didn’t have to die from. It’s not like she got knocked down by a bus.

“Our mother died of breast cancer, so you go and you have tests every year, which is what I do. And she didn’t. She felt a lump and she didn’t do anything about it, which really is a lesson to all women. For god’s sake, if you find something, do something about it. When she finally went, it was too late.”
Collins’ own health is good. There was a back problem, but physiotherapy worked. She’s had COVID-19 twice. The second time it was “like a cold”, but first time round it was bad. Was she scared of dying? “No.”

Does she ever wake up and feel she can’t be bothered to be the great Joan Collins that day? She looks puzzled. “I work because I love it. It’s the roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd,” she says. “I love acting and I’m really looking forward to the tour because that, in a way, is acting too. I’m putting on my best persona so that you’ll write nice things about me.”

The Times, UK

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