JOAN ‘MEN T COLLINS ME LIK
THE VETERAN HOLLYWOOD STAR HAS LEARNT SOME HARD LIFE LESSONS
She played the ever-scheming ‘super-b---h’ Alexis Carrington Colby in TV soap Dynasty. But it was behind the scenes where things really got dirty for screen legend Dame Joan Collins, who waged a war with producers for equal pay.
At first, Joan, who played Alexis from 1981 to 1989, was not paid much. But as the series took off, Alexis became a clear fan favourite. And as Joan reveals, when she asked for the same money as male lead John Forsythe, she was knocked back.
“I was totally refused, like, ‘Oh, no. He is the man. He gets more money,’” Joan, 87, recalls.
“And a lot more money. Almost twice as much as what I was getting.”
When Joan demanded more money or she’d walk, things quickly turned nasty.
“I was called every name under the sun, like, ambitious b---h and aggressive,” she says. “You can’t be a strong woman without being insulted like crazy, particularly in the ’80s. They threw the book at me. Thank God there was no social media then – I don’t know what I would have done.”
By the time she did get pay parity, she was told she
was too expensive to have in the series and the number of episodes she appeared in was cut – as was her salary. “Speaking subjectively, the series went down the tube. I loved that series,” she reflects.
Joan was a teenager when she began appearing in Hollywood movies, playing a beauty contestant in 1951’s Lady Godiva Rides Again and a breakout role as a delinquent in 1952’s I Believe in You, a role which earned her the moniker of ‘Britain’s Bad Girl’. Shockingly, the then young and naive actress was, she says, treated like a “toy” by men. In 2014, Joan admitted she was raped when she was 17 by Irish actor
Maxwell Reed, who she would go on to marry.
“If you were pretty, you were even more of a toy and the more they would like to use you, abuse you and throw you away,” Joan, who recently appeared at an event for the UN’S Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, says. “I was told when I was 21 that I better make every opportunity count [because] by the time I was 23 I would be washed up and finished.”
As well as battling ageism in Hollywood, Joan also experienced sexism, constantly being referred to as ‘The Girl’. “I remember saying, ‘My name is Joan. Why do you have to call me ‘the girl’?” the actress remembers. “But they just said, ‘You are “the girl”. That is what you are.’”
Joan’s advice for younger actresses starting out is to never let anybody say, “Let me see your legs” or “Let me come closer, let me feel your skin.” And in the era of #Metoo and Harvey Weinstein, that would seem to be a message that is getting through.
But still,
Joan warns, there are those that desperately chase fame in order to be, in her words, “one of those Kardashian-type people”.
Growing up with her sister, Jackie, and brother, Bill, Joan admits she lived in fear of being abused by her father. She recalls an incident when she and Jackie were throwing soap at each other in the bath and their mother told them, “Your father is really going to beat you up when he comes in.”
“When he came in I literally froze,” she adds. “I was like, ‘He is going to hit me. He is going to hit me.’ He never did, but the threat was always there.”
Having been married five times – she wed her most recent husband, Percy Gibson, in 2002 – Joan says her advice for women is to be “resilient” and to not “put up with any crap from anybody like your partner, husband, children or boss”.
“I had some unfortunate marriages and I have the best marriage and best man I could hope for,” she beams. “You have to be friends [to make it work].”
Steve’s children, Robert and Bindi, were just kids when he was killed by a stingray in 2006, at the age of 44.