“I won’t have a glass of wine because if I do I’ll tell you anything,” says Dame Joan Collins, settling into a quiet table at Olivio in Elizabeth Street. Even without the lubrication of alcohol this great dame, the Dynasty diva with a nine-decade acting career, proves deliciously indiscreet on subjects ranging from Brexit to the US election to her five husbands.
She’s 91 but hates being defined by it, and in her last memoir, Behind the Shoulder Pads, listed the ages of all the journalists vulgar enough to bring it up (I’m 58, Joan, for the next volume). She’s in her “uniform”, a 10-year-old Erdem dress (“I used to love him but he changed his style”), a white jacket she designed herself and a hat “bought for $10 in an American supermarket” — she has homes in LA and St Tropez as well as Belgravia. Smaller than I expected from her regal image, she has good skin, a level, green-eyed gaze, a deliciously wry smile and a quick wit.
An example. I ask her if she regrets anything and she says, “Three ... no, two dreadful marriages. My first one, when I was 18 [to actor Maxwell Reed] and my last one to Peter Holm.” The pop singer and playboy was her penultimate spouse, before her current union with Percy Gibson, 32 years her junior, who she married in 2002.
“I don’t regret Tony [writer and actor Anthony Newley] and Ron [Kass, a businessman] because I had children with them,” she says of husbands two and three. “And sadly, they’re all dead now.” Holm is still alive, I say. “Is he?” she retorts with immaculate uninterest. “I don’t follow his fortunes. Michael Caine used to call him ‘the Swedish comedian’.” She, Caine and his wife Shakira meet for dinner “every two weeks or so”, and I sense she’s slightly miffed that her cockney contemporary has started writing novels, a field Joan followed her sister Jackie into.
“I think I might write another book,” she says airily. “I’ve done 19.” Initially she says she won’t talk about politics before jumping in with both feet. As a current affairs obsessive who takes five newspapers and devours TV bulletins, she’s glued to the American presidential election. “There’s a lot of sneering going on. I’m glad I don’t have to vote. I don’t know who’s lying. I would like to see a woman president, which is not to say I’d like it to be Kamala Harris. We’ve already had a black president and I thought he was good. America is in a pretty bad state. But then again, so is Britain.”
Roadworks and reckless pavement cyclists annoy her in London but her real ire is reserved for Sir Keir Starmer’s withdrawal of the winter fuel allowance. “I think it’s a total, total, total outrage what they’re doing to pensioners. These are people of my generation, and even older and younger, people between 60 and 100 let’s say, who have saved, like I have saved. I have three homes, but nobody’s ever given me anything. No husband has ever given me anything: they’ve taken from me.” On Brexit she says: “I did vote for it and now I don’t know whether it’s good or bad. I do know that I can only spend 90 days in the South of France now and we get taxed on our home there.”
No husband has ever given me anything: they’ve taken from me
She didn’t rate Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss or Theresa May but “I am a Tory. Everyone knows that. I was a huge fan of Mrs Thatcher. I cannot believe that Starmer took down her portrait. I think that’s an insult.” She gives a self-reproving peal of laughter. “What am I saying? I’m never going to be invited to Chequers! Not that I ever was by Sunak. The only person who ever invited me to Chequers was Tony Blair. I liked Blair. He told me he wanted to be an actor. I said, you’d have been a great one.”
She retains a fondness for Boris Johnson, who encouraged her to write for The Spectator when he was editor, and she is shocked to hear the magazine has been sold. “Really? To English people I hope.” I tell her the buyer is Paul Marshall, the co-owner of GB News. “Oh, I don’t watch that very much,” she says with lofty disdain. “I watch Jeremy Vine, who I love. And Loose Women. I watch a lot of news and sometimes I’ll just put MTV on: I can’t bear a black screen.”
We’ve met to talk about her stage show, also called Behind the Shoulder Pads, which comes to the Adelphi on October 22. MC-ed by her husband Percy, it opens with a film montage of everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Johnny Carson introducing her.
“Then I come on, I say something witty, like ‘I’m Joan Collins’, and I launch into my life story, making it as amusing and interesting as I can, because everybody’s heard it a billion times.” After a break and a change into a new Amanda Wakeley or Jenny Packham gown there’s a Q&A with the audience. What’s the most surprising thing she’s been asked? “How do you put your false eyelashes on? And I said, I don’t wear false eyelashes any more. I don’t even wear mascara or eyeliner. They’ll ask about Dynasty, about the actors I worked with like John Gielgud, Nigel Hawthorne and Paul Newman. And they’ll often ask who was the best kisser.” And who was? “Paul Newman, of course,”
Hers is an extraordinary life and career. She was born in Bayswater in 1933 and had a strict upbringing in Maida Vale by parents she adored, her father an authoritarian Jewish South African theatrical agent, her mother a dance teacher who taught her always to exercise, keep the sun off her face and “always leave something on my plate”. (She doesn’t finish her starter portion of ravioli today.) Her mother died at 52 of breast cancer, the same disease that later claimed her younger sister Jackie: she has a younger brother, Bill, and a half-sister, Natasha, from her father’s second marriage.
Young Joan wanted to be a clothes designer or a stage actress: at 16 she went to Rada and at 17 was signed to the Rank Organisation as a starlet quickly dubbed “Britain’s bad girl.” Maxwell Reed, she revealed in an earlier autobiography, drugged and raped her on their first date and she married him in 1952 out of “shame”. They were already divorcing when 20th Century Fox flew her out to LA in 1954 with a seven-year contract.
“It’s seven years because, you know, a woman of 27 has lost her allure and become an OLD PERSON,” she snorts. “But it was terribly daunting. I was only 20: my mother couldn’t come with me as she was ill and my sister was too young. They [Fox] found me an apartment, hired me a car, got me an agent and a financial adviser who ended up screwing me blind. Figuratively, that is.”
One boyfriend, Sydney Chaplin (“Charlie’s son”) introduced her to a social circle including Gene Kelly: another, Warren Beatty, got her pregnant and she had an abortion for the sake of both their careers. “The last time I saw him, he was going into some event with Annette [Bening, his wife], and he said to Percy, ‘I still love this woman.’ Ridiculous.” She made scores of films, but shortly after appearing with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in The Road to Hong Kong in 1962, “I met Tony Newley and started having babies.”
Following the birth of Tara in 1963 and Sacha in 1965, the marriage ended in 1970 after Newley detailed his infidelities in the musical Can Heironymus Merkin Ever
Forgive Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? After a fitful decade, including a guest spot on Star Trek in 1967, her acting career cranked up again with a handful of horror films, comedies and thrillers in the 1970s. “I’ve done some really crappy films, Nick, but that’s the profession,” she says. “If you’re a baker you don’t always bake the perfect loaf. And I was the breadwinner in my family for many years.”
She had met Ron Kass, head of Apple Records and later Warner Bros Records UK, in 1969 and married him in 1972. Their daughter Katyana, known as Katy, was born the same year and in 1980 was seriously injured in a car crash. This happened after her mother’s second coming as a softcore sex symbol in The Stud (1978) and The Bitch (1979) adapted from her sister Jackie’s bonkbusters. She and Kass divorced in 1983 and he died in 1986: in her book, she says Dodi Fayed, who was living in their Chelsea basement, got Kass addicted to cocaine. “I don’t like to talk about Ron, because I’m very close to Katy ...” she tails off. “I just don’t talk about their [her children’s] fathers.”
From 1981 to 1989 she played Alexis, the glamorous, scheming first wife of John Forsythe’s Blake Carrington, in Aaron Spelling’s American mega-soap Dynasty, and it’s the only thing she still watches herself in today. “It’s a fantastic show with wonderful actors, all looking great, beautifully shot, with incredible clothes and a very, very good narrative. During Covid there was nothing to watch, and Percy and I found this big box set I’d never opened: half of the shows I’d never seen, because I always came back to England during hiatus, and that’s when they were screened.
“But boy did they push me around,” she continues. “They suspended me and refused to give me a raise even though I was extremely popular and on every magazine cover. So in the end I said, ‘Screw you’, and didn’t go back for season five. Eventually they came back and gave me a small raise, but it still had to be less than John Forsythe got.” She wreaked some small revenge, though. “I stole a lot from Dynasty. I couldn’t steal the clothes, so I took the costume jewellery. I hope Candy Spelling [Aaron’s widow] doesn’t read this. She’ll want them back.”
Through the Nineties she took occasional film roles but also returned to her first love, theatre. The company manager on a 2000 US tour of the play Love Letters she did was one Percy Gibson. They fell in love, despite the age difference. “If he dies, he dies,” she memorably quipped when guest-hosting Have I Got News for You. “We have the same blood group,” she says when I ask the secret of their relationship. “He’s just a wonderful man. He is kind, thoughtful, funny, the most caring person, a take-charge guy and a gentleman — of which there ain’t too many around today. We play very competitive poker and Scrabble and he loves and takes care of my children.”
She’s still a “jobbing actress”, appearing in American Horror Story and trying to get a film about Wallis Simpson’s last years off the ground. “But I’m very happy not to work. I have a wonderful life. I have a great husband. Terrific friends, great children.” She also has four grandchildren, who keep her au fait with social media. Collins runs her own Instagram account. “I’ve got over half a million followers, which is pathetic compared to influencers” — she almost spits the word — “but pretty good for someone like me.”
She enjoys eating out and visiting the cinema and the theatre, most recently taking in Fawlty Towers the Play and Sir Ian McKellen’s film The Critic. She thinks most fashion today is “bleurgh” but loves a trawl through the Oxford Street M&S. She credits her upbringing for the fact she never went broke or off the rails on drink or drugs (“look at Matthew Perry”) and has remained “normal”. Claridge’s in Mayfair is known to be one of her favourite places, marrying Percy Gibson there in 2002.
“When people talk to me they say, ‘Oh, Joan, you’re so normal.’ Which I am. All this diva shit that people throw on me, that’s from the characters that I played.” She flashes her smile again: “I do give really good diva. On stage I diva it to death.”
Joan Collins: Behind the Shoulder Pads is at the Adelphi Theatre on October 22; lwtheatres.co.uk
