Fierce at 84 Joan Collins uncensored
The star talks marriage, movies and missing Jackie
Dame Joan Collins knows how to turn heads. But as the glamorous veteran actress gracefully sashays her way through the VIP dining room of five-star London hotel Claridge’s for our interview, she doesn’t notice the effect she has on her fellow diners.
She leaves them openmouthed and in no doubt that, yes, she really does look that good in the flesh. The 84-year-old is clear, though, that her age-defying
appearance is natural. “You can tell because I have lines and jowls,” insists Joan. “When I see women around my age, I think I look pretty good!”
She sure does. Her bouffant mane is immaculately coiffed and though she could easily pass for someone 25 years younger, her face doesn’t show any tell-tale signs of being touched by a surgeon’s scalpel.
Joan is a huge advocate of keeping her skin out of the sun. “Also not putting on weight – it’s fatal,” she adds, grabbing her lower stomach. “I have this and can’t get rid of it. It doesn't matter what I do. I have a trainer who comes over, and I do stretches and lunges. We don’t do anything too strenuous because I don’t believe in ‘no pain, no gain’.”
Joan has been defying expectations since she made her stage debut in 1942, aged nine, despite her own father, talent agent Joseph Collins, warning she’d be “washed-up” by 23. She laughs, “That was the thinking in the ’50s – back then, 27 or 28 was considered the cut-off time for the beauty and youth of girls.”
Fortunately, Joan proved her dad wrong, securing her star status by appearing in 70 films to date. However, during her time in the industry, the star has also faced uphill battles, from being pressured into taking weight-loss pills and escaping predatory filmmakers, to fighting for equal pay.
These challenges have only made her more determined and standing by her strong views has paid off.
Age-oldproblem
At an age when most actresses have long been forgotten, Joan is a star even bigger than the shoulder pads sported by her most iconic character, society super-bitch Alexis Colby on the iconic soap opera Dynasty. But even she struggles to find work in her 80s.
Joan confesses, “There are older-women parts, but quite frankly, they go first of all to Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren, Meryl Streep or Susan Sarandon. There are 20
women they’re going to go through before they get to me.”
But that wasn’t the case with the new Thelma& Louise- style rom-com The
TimeofTheirLives, which CalltheMidwife director Roger Goldby wrote with Joan in mind. Billed as a “feel-good, old-age pensioner romp”, the film stars Joan as a faded Hollywood sex siren who is desperate to reclaim the spotlight.
“It’s got a great honesty about it,” the actress tells. “Fame is totally fleeting and that’s one of the things I learned very early on. It casts a light on the misery of celebs as they get older. At fan conventions, you see people you haven’t heard of for 30 or 40 years selling their photographs. They were so beautiful and now they’re absolutely unknown. They love the fame and, unfortunately, it’s gone.”
Joan is well aware she has broken the usual actress trajectory and how pitifully rare her new movie is. She explains, “Today, big-budget films are made by big businesses and all of the companies have one motive in mind – to make money. Their audience is mostly young men between the ages of 12 and 28, and they want to see young, nubile girls.
“I work out with quite a few young actresses in the gym in LA and I say, ‘You’re so thin and you’re 25. What are you doing?’ This particular actress, who is very well-known, said, ‘I have to look thin. That’s what the directors want when I audition.’ If you’re over 50kg, forget it – you’re considered fat.”
Joan’s own experience of being pressured into losing weight in Hollywood is one of the reasons she advised her goddaughter, model Cara Delevingne, 24, not to become an actress. She recalls that she was in her 20s and weighed 57kg when she was asked to lose four kilos.
Slimpickings
“I was sent to a studio doctor as they thought I was too fat,” she tells. “He gave me these little green pills to take every morning, but then I couldn’t sleep at night, so he gave me sleeping pills. It was fabulous because I hardly ever ate and lost three kilos. But then I did some research and found out they’re what destroyed Judy Garland. So many in my profession have been destroyed by drugs and it’s the rare actor who doesn’t get consumed by them.”
Fortunately, Joan is a rarity. She swore off drugs after being forced to take cocaine at a party in the ’60s. But she still found herself being preyed on by the powerful men of the movie world.
“It started off being a fight at 17 – producers, directors, actors and heads of studios all wanting to take a piece of you, if you know what I mean. It was very predatory. Young actresses just accepted that’s the way men were.
“It was nothing for a man to pinch your bottom and say, ‘You’re such a cute little thing.’ You grinned and pushed it to the back of your mind. Even at school, a pastor put his hand on my thigh and stroked it. But you didn’t think ‘dirty old man’ and report him to your mother.”
Joan is relieved times have changed, but she does question whether female empowerment has come at a cost. “We’ve lost men being gallant – opening doors, carrying our parcels and helping put our bags into the plane’s overhead lockers,” she muses. “There’s been over-militancy with some women and it’s turned men off. But I don’t want to get hate mail, so let’s move on.”
However, we can’t drop girl power entirely. After all, Joan was a trailblazer in the showbiz industry. At a time when it wasn’t wholly accepted for women to speak out, she fought Dynasty bosses to make her character Alexis – who she based on Donald Trump – more fashionable, swapping tame tweed suits for flamboyant Yves Saint Laurent gowns.
Before Joan, the show’s ratings were unimpressive, but when she joined for the second series, in 1981, everything changed. By 1985,
Dynasty was the top show in the States and had won five Golden Globes.
However, Joan’s co-star John Forsythe, who played her on-screen ex-husband Blake Carrington, was being paid around $14,000 more an episode and when she learnt this, she went to bosses and demanded she should also be earning $69,000 per show.
Joan recalls, “I was told,
‘You’ve got ideas above your station and we’re not going to have you back,’ so I went off to Paris. I wasn’t in the first episode of season three because I was holding out for more money. I felt I deserved it.”
The actress swiftly returned to Dynasty after having her pay increased, but she got a lot of flak and hate mail for it, which only worsened her reputation as an Alexislike diva and man-eater, which she says is unfair. Yes, she’s been married five times, but she and husband Percy Gibson, 52, recently celebrated their 15th anniversary.
“I have a great husband and am so lucky,” she smiles. “My God, in Hollywood, this is a record. No-one has been married for 15 years!”
Inevitably, eyebrows have been raised about their 32-year age gap. But Joan says, “Our fathers were born within three years of each other. We have similar outlooks, even though he’s younger. There’s a stigma, but it doesn’t bother us. He’s always had a mature look, so it doesn’t look like there’s this huge age difference.”
Talking about Percy is when Joan is at her most relaxed. It’s clear she’s besotted. What’s more, we’re in the hotel where they tied the knot in 2002. Joan continues, “He’s incredibly kind, nice and caring. It doesn’t mean that we don’t bicker and argue. He smokes, but I’m not going to stop him. Other than that, we’re very happy. When we got together, we talked about wanting kids. He didn’t, which is great.”
Joan has two children, Tara, 53, and Alexander, 51, from her second marriage, to late actor Anthony Newley, and a third, Katyana, 44, from her third marriage, to businessman Ron Kass. That relationship ended after Joan discovered her husband’s drug problem, which he’d spent most of Joan’s earnings on.
But that’s nothing compared to Joan’s first husband, Irish actor Maxwell Reed, who raped and drugged her before their wedding. He later tried to sell her for $18,000 to an Arab sheik, which was when she filed for divorce. Her fourth marriage, to Swedish singer Peter Holm, ended after two years due to his adultery.
“But I’ve never let anything get me down,” asserts Joan. “I’ve never suffered from depression. Well, I did the other day, for about half a day. It’s this new movie I’m supposed to be doing. We were ready to shoot and then the money fell out. I felt anger, depression and sadness. I thought, ‘I’ll never work again,’ but then I just got into bed, ate some chocolate and watched a movie.”
Joan’s mood turns more sombre, however, when talk turns to her beloved younger sister Jackie, the pioneer of the bonkbuster novel, who died from breast cancer in 2015 after secretly battling the disease for six years. She only told Joan she was ill two weeks before her death.
“She was so brave,” Joan says softly. “We were very close. It took me a long time to get over it, but that’s life – we’re all going to go, darling. It made me aware that time runs out for everyone, so make every day count.”
As she gets ready to leave, she fields a call about a dress she’s wearing to an awards ceremony, discusses plans for a new movie and gives us a parting hug – a rarity, according to her team – before meeting her daughter to go shopping. No-one could deny that Joan is living life to the full.