Joan Collins Life Makes Me Happy
THE FORMER DYNASTY DIVA OPENS UP ABOUT HER LOVES, LOSSES AND WHAT SHE’S LEARNED AT 85
Dame Joan Collins doesn’t scare easily. But she calls FX’s creepy supernatural hit American Horror Story: Apocalypse “incredibly frightening! I’ve been frightened on the set several times and I play three or four different characters.” So far, she’s played glamorous grandma Evie Gallant and conspiring witch Bubbles McGee, and the legendary actress, style icon and Dynasty diva is having “great fun,” she says, “because it’s unexpected, and [producer] Ryan Murphy is the Aaron Spelling of his day, isn’t he?”
It seems like Joan has come full circle from her 1980s heyday when she played the ultimate pot-stirrer Alexis
Carrington on the Spelling- produced hit Dynasty. Despite being spooked by the AHS storyline, Joan, 85, says, “When you get to a certain age, there’s really nothing to be scared of anymore.”
That wasn’t always the case through her 60-plus-year career, 18 books and five marriages. In darker times, she survived World War II, sexual assault and the loss of her sister, Jackie. But Joan has always kept working and is still seemingly at the height of her powers.
She has also learned not to take anything for granted. “You’ve got to eat life or life will eat you,” says Joan. So if people want to call her fearless, she’s fine with that. “No one has ever said the word ‘fearless’ to me before,” Joan admits, “but I suppose in a way I am.”
Growing up in London the daughter of dance teacher Elsa and talent agent Joe Collins, Joan refers to her-
self as “a Blitz baby” and recalls days hiding in air raid shelters during World War II. “My mother was terrified, because they’d see the bombs falling, but none of it really bothered me,” she says.
Joan credits Elsa for instilling her dedication to beauty. “My mother always had daytime clothes as well as evening wear,” she notes. And to this day Joan is fastidious about keeping herself healthy and fit. She has her own line of products, Joan Collins Timeless Beauty, and she is “scrupulous about cleaning, toning and moisturizing,” she says.
From birth, Joan’s looks attracted enough attention that her mother put a sign on her stroller that read, “Please do not kiss me!” And Joan reveled in being “Daddy’s little darling.” But when her sister, Jackie, and brother, Bill, were born, she felt she’d lost his attention, and reflects, “Some of my quests for the eternal love of impossible men were to capture Daddy.”
Growing up surrounded by her dad’s theatrical clients, Joan trained as a dancer and actress and began landing professional roles as a teen.
“I suddenly became aware of my sex appeal,” she remembers. But she also says she made a decision early on: “I would not be ‘nice to,’ ‘sleep with’ or even kiss anyone for a job,” she says.
UNLUCKY IN LOVE
Talent and beauty took Joan to Hollywood in the 1950s, where she starred in films like The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing with Ray Milland and Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys! with Paul Newman. But her love life didn’t run smoothly. Her first husband-to-be, matinee idol Maxwell Reed, drugged and assaulted her while she was still a virgin at age 17. Confused and self-recriminating, she began dating him. Though they married, she found “there is a fine line between love and hate,” she says, “and I was treading it with Max.” They separated after seven months.
Joan dated some of Hollywood’s legendary leading men, including Warren Beatty, who proposed — she still keeps his engagement ring, along with some of her others, in a safe deposit box. Warren was a part of the “in” crowd when she first arrived in Los Angeles. “Every Saturday night I’d be invited to a party, and there’d be Cary Grant and Gary Cooper,”
she recalls. She worked with Bette Davis and got advice from Marilyn Monroe, who told her “Beware of the wolves in Hollywood, honey.”
She tried, but the wolves were legion. Warren strayed, as did her second husband, actor Anthony Newley, with whom she had two kids, Tara, now 55, and Alexander, 53. With her third husband, Beatles record label executive Ron Kass, she had another child, Katyana, 46. She divorced him in 1983 after 11 years but they remained friends. Following another brief marriage to Swedish pop singer Peter Holm, Joan finally found lasting love with Percy Gibson, the son of a South American publishing and banking dynasty. Thirty-two years her junior, “Percy is such an amazing man,” she raves. “He is so kind and so caring.”
Percy was separated from his wife at the time, but they fell in love, and despite their age difference, they’ve been happily wed for 16 years. Says Joan, “Marrying a younger man has the advantage of being with someone who has vigor, vitality, stamina and health, which certainly encourages me even further to keep in shape both physically and mentally.”
Two of Joan’s divorces took place while she was chewing the scenery
on Dynasty as Alexis, the character she is most closely identified with. But she almost didn’t get the part. “They were trying to get Sophia Loren, she turned it down…and then they were trying for Elizabeth Taylor,” Joan says. “So I was like the fourth one they wanted.”
PASSION AND LOSS
Still, producer Spelling once said that after Joan famously strutted through her first scene in 1981 wearing a veiled hat and glasses, he couldn’t imagine anyone else for the role. “The character could have been played by 50 people and 49 of them would have failed,” he said. “She made it work.”
Joan embraced all that Alexis had to offer. “I was basing her on all the businessmen I knew who were heartless,” she says. “The glamorous part with the over-the-top clothes, I based on one of my best friends. She was extremely glamorous, and unfortunately very miserable. But I don’t think Alexis was miserable. I think she enjoyed her life and lived it to the fullest.”
The same could be said of Joan, who was dealing with a personal tragedy as her work on Dynasty began. Her daughter Katy, then 9, had been hit by a car in 1980 and suffered a traumatic brain injury. “When I heard the word ‘critical’ I got hysterical,” Joan later recalled. She never left her daughter’s side as she lay in a coma and then through her long, slow recovery, which left Katy with brain damage.
Eventually, Joan returned to work and she has continued to act steadily in addition to writing several novels, like her famous sister, Jackie.
When Jackie died in 2015, it shook Joan badly. Jackie had kept her breast cancer secret, and Joan learned about the illness just a few weeks before her sister died. “You never get over it,” Joan says. “I have a lot of her things surrounding me,” she adds of her home in LA. “We made so many memories here.”
Despite that devastating loss, Joan says she remains upbeat. “I was born with the happy gene and the energy gene,” she says. “What makes me happiest is seeing my children happy.” And when she’s not working, she enjoys spending time at home with her husband and her family.
She keeps fit by working out with a trainer and she eats right, although she admits, “I do not have a kale smoothie with mashed pears and lemongrass in the morning,” she says. “That whole thing about ‘clean eating’ I find ridiculous!” Instead, she has a coffee and croissant.
So is it likely this “working actor” will ever retire? Don’t hold your breath. “Everybody said to me, ‘You’ll be over by the time you’re 24,’” Joan says. “Over and over again, I have been told this by men. But it hasn’t been true yet!” And she says there’s no secret to what keeps her going strong. “I’ve worked hard all my life, but I wake up each morning thinking how fortunate I am,” she says. “Honestly, life makes me happy.”
“I’m very fit and healthy now — knock on wood! — and I try to look after myself.” — Joan