'A rollercoaster’ is the description Joan Collins applies to her life in her
forthcoming one-woman show, One Night with Joan. Collins plays it for laughs,
mischief in the famously green eyes. But her assessment is no exaggeration.
Admittedly there have been ups; there have certainly been downs, including
disastrous marriages and some career lurches. She takes them as they come, a
stranger to self-pity. ‘I kind of coast along,’ she tells me when I meet her for
lunch in Los Angeles.
The one remarkably constant ‘up’, of course, has been her appearance. Today
Joan Collins remains one of the world’s most photographed women and, by common
consent, among its most glamorous.
‘I think I’m quite photogenic,’ she tells me simply, with no intended
coyness, then, hearing herself, repeats, ‘“I think I’m quite photogenic,” she
said modestly.’ Her own website, complete with Twitter link (Collins eventually
gave in in 2010 – ‘This IS me... stay tuned!’ – having previously described the
tweeting habit as ‘the most banal and boring pastime ever invented’), describes
her unequivocally as ‘a fashion maven of timeless beauty’. The key word is
‘timeless’.
I meet Joan Collins in a small Italian restaurant between Beverly Hills and
West Hollywood. Il Piccolino is cheerful and unpretentious. It is a day of
unexpectedly bright March sunshine, and awnings, which partly surround the
restaurant, have been lifted to catch any passing breeze. Instead they catch the
throaty susurration of near-constant LA traffic. Indoors, the air is shadowy,
with a suggestion of that heaviness sometimes imposed by the sun at midday.
The fixer behind our date is Collins’s husband. Her fifth, Percy Gibson is
part Scots, part South American and a theatre company manager whom Collins
married in 2002. Today she describes him simply as her best friend. ‘We love
being with each other all the time, we’re completely compatible and we’re each
other’s “accomplices” in life.’ Gibson has organised a corner table indoors on
to which another table has been attached so that no matter how full the
restaurant becomes there will be at least an empty table’s length between us and
prying ears.
I see Gibson first, tall & tanned, he does not come into the restaurant but peers through the open door, presumably to check that I have arrived. Perhaps he tips his wife the wink. Fleetingly I think I catch a glimmer of something protective in his very presence and the attitude it implies. As hunches go it’s evanescent but curiously moving none the less.
And then there she is, understatedly elegant in a white straw fedora from Macy’s, a black-and-white shirt over white jeans (bought in the market in St Tropez, she later tells me), and everything springs into action: restaurateur, waitresses, me – the first coolly in control, the second smiling, while I scatter across the banquette sunglasses, notes, mobile and pencils. Other diners shift in their seats. It is not that Il Piccolino comes to a standstill, but a ripple temporarily stirs the calm. Only Collins herself behaves quite normally. Even her greeting – just, perceptibly, remote – seems to strike the right note.
It was during the West End run of Noël Coward’s Private Lives in 1990, in which Collins played the lead role of Amanda Prynne, that fellow actress Maria Aitken described her as ‘a miracle of preservation’. That tag may or may not have been intended as a compliment. It captured nevertheless the ring of the truth both then and, as I can see for myself, now. Aitken said what many thought. For us Brits the longevity of the Collins allure is indeed a minor national miracle, explored in magazine columns as well as a number of Collins’s own lucratively glossy books with titles such as My Secrets and Joan’s Way: Looking Good, Feeling Great.
The ongoing preservation of this Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty has, in its small way, formed a topic of fascinated speculation in British gossip since Collins’s glory days as the vengeful mega-bitch Alexis Carrington in the 1980s super-soap Dynasty. Collins is unfazed. Her constant mantra has been that her appearance is a statement of how she feels about herself (‘If you look sloppy and slobby and dirty and unkempt…’); that, disliking needles, she has never undergone cosmetic surgery (‘Plastic surgery is the plain woman’s revenge’); and that she hated her single dalliance with Botox (‘horrible, I loathed it’).
On a hot Saturday lunchtime in LA, in the soft light that filters through the banana palms, she is as instantly recognisable as… Joan Collins. All this with a degree of understatement to boot, settling herself at the head of the table, smiling at the waitress and the restaurateur, with whom she is on easy terms, shuffling sunglasses and handbag (Chanel, signature quilted leather in white, if you’re wondering); the manoeuvre, as one theatre critic once described her, ‘remarkably devoid of look-at-me posturing’: no swagger, no swank, no suggestion of a performance.
The woman in front of me made her first film, aged 19, in 1951. The following year she posed for the black-and-white portraits by Cornel Lucas that appear in the background of the main picture of this article. In 1955, after Marilyn Monroe turned down the role, Collins played the lead in a film called The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing: Evelyn Nesbit, a dazzling young model and chorus girl who inspires among the men in her life a tornado of macho jealousy. One reviewer described her as ‘startlingly beautiful and sexy’. With a seven-year contract with Twentieth Century Fox under her belt, she teetered on the brink of Hollywood superstardom. It never quite happened. Collins had been puffed as Fox’s answer to Elizabeth Taylor, but it was Taylor who bagged the better roles as well as the plaudits (how she lost out to Taylor for the role of Cleopatra in 1960 is among Collins’s anecdotes in One Night with Joan). In the end, Fox declined to renew its contract.
Collins (right) in Dynasty with her co-star Linda Evans (REX FEATURES)
Twenty years later she got there, thanks to Dynasty and Alexis Carrington, that masterclass in vampish high camp which was partly inspired by the ‘very clever business acumen of Donald Trump’; she was aided by recent starring roles in the hugely successful adaptations of her sister Jackie’s books The Stud and The Bitch. Over the course of eight years the role earned her a succession of Golden Globe nominations and, in 1983, the award for Best Actress in a TV Series (Drama). In her 50s Collins found herself to be one of the most famous women on the planet.
Along the way she married and divorced four times. She had two children with Anthony Newley – the writer Tara, born in 1963, and the artist Sacha, bornin 1965 – and, in 1971, a daughter Katyana with her third husband, Ron Kass. The rest, as they say, is history and not a topic on which she herself appears to dwell, save in the super-slick format of her one-woman show, devised with Gibson seven years ago and subsequently toured across the globe.
In the case of most actresses on the brink of their ninth decade, an illustrated backward glance of this sort would inspire a degree of pathos. Not Collins. There is a bravado quality to One Night with Joan, a strutting chutzpah in keeping with the ballsy but kittenish hauteur she typically turns on for TV chat shows. The Collins who emerges from this carefully crafted vehicle, which is constantly added to, updated, altered and refined, is formidable but very funny. And why not? She remains, as that 1950s reviewer appraised her, ‘startlingly beautiful’. ‘People come to see the show to be entertained,’ she says, ‘and it is very entertaining.’ She pauses. ‘And I think they might want to know something about me.
‘I took control of my image from shortly after I left Twentieth Century Fox,’ she continues. ‘They put me in those wigs, dreadful wigs, and painted my face. I was in my 20s – early 20s – and I looked 40. I had to conform to so much.’ Freed from studio demands, she ditched the conformity and developed an aesthetic of her own, which has since acquired an iconic quality. The Collins look does not change: smokily ringed green eyes in a heart-shaped pale face with a gash of bright lipstick. The portrait that accompanies this piece, taken with bright, bright lighting but not, Collins insists, heavily retouched, reiterates that story.
Collins starred in adaptations of The Bitch and The Stud in the 1970s (REX FEATURES)
On the day we meet the lipstick is pink, very pink. Subtly her white hat shades her face. To this untrained eye her face conspicuously lacks the plump, blancmange-skin sheen of the facelift, and the effect is impressive and lovely. Although I feel uncomfortable subjecting her appearance to such forensic scrutiny, I remind myself that this is part of the point. Had her looks faded, it is unlikely Joan Collins would remain so conspicuously in the public eye, still making films, TV appearances, commercials. She sweeps aside my mention of her approaching birthday. Shall we say it quickly? I suggest. Her reply is softly spoken but deeply felt: ‘I don’t want to say it at all.’ She really means it. ‘I refuse to be defined by my age. In 1913, 40 was old and most people were dead at 60. In 100 years’ time, centenarians will be a dime a dozen.’
There is a dilemma here. That Joan Collins continues to look so much younger than she is does not detract from her age: instead it draws our attention to it. Her face is proof of the victory of what reveals itself as a very stubborn philosophy of happiness. ‘I’m not one of those people who analyse everything, not at all,’ she says. ‘I don’t think where I’m going to be in five years, I think where I’m going to be in two weeks, because I’m going to be in New York. And I try to make each day like a mini-lifetime – to achieve something and to enjoy something. I live in the present totally – and the future: who knows what the future is?’ That she says this matter-of-factly underlines her sincerity. She speaks lightly, however. If I feel there is an intimate quality to our lunch, I am probably deluding myself, swayed by a personality I find both warm and sympathetic and her utter lack of stridency.
Nothing in Joan Collins suggests the older person clinging on to youth. She simply is, in some odd, indefinable, possibly unique way, young. She is different and exhilaratingly so. Or perhaps it is a characteristic of Collins women: her younger sister Jackie, the multi-million-selling author, suggests a similar unflagging agelessness. ‘Jackie and I are terribly close. She’s more fun to be with than practically any other person than my husband.’ In Los Angeles the sisters meet up two or three times a week, often for mid-morning cinema trips.
Collins with her sister Jackie seen here in the 1950s (REX FEATURES)
She dislikes ladettes and reality television (‘Everybody is “amazing”. “I’m living my dream”,’ she parodies). She is disappointed by new films, in which ‘each one has more explosives, more gun violence, more blood, more murder’. She ‘loathes’ political correctness, investing the verb with a long-drawn-out fruitiness in that instantly recognisable voice which has also failed to age. She loves ‘the dressing-up box’, caviar and private jets: the costly trappings of old-fashioned stardom. Her grande-luxe version of star quality would have been recognisable to any one of the Hollywood greats with whom she worked at the outset of her career: Bette Davis, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Paul Newman. ‘I’m a frustrated florist,’ she admits,
and at one point in our conversation I catch a glimpse of the picture on her phone screen: a close-up of a single blood-red rose. She gives money to charity and involves herself in a number of causes, notably breast cancer and children’s learning disabilities, without fandango. She considers the Royal family ‘magnificent’, especially the Queen. And yet, when she tells me, ‘I think I’m quite modern,’ I agree with her.
Collins drinks iced tea – with sugar added – and water and eats a plate of steamed, sautéed broccoli, nothing else. It is what she always orders at Il Piccolino and the chef knows how she likes it, nice and soft. ‘So good for you,’ she announces. It is symptomatic of an approach towards diet and wellbeing that is careful but unhysterical (as per a recent tweet: ‘Today’s tip: serve your food on a smaller plate – you’ll eat less’). She works out regularly, uses a trainer and eats healthily but unfaddishly, true to her ‘British no-nonsense gene’. She is a fully paid- up member of what must be a remarkably elite club of ladies of her age who can still do the splits.
Occasionally the sound of the traffic does its best to hijack our conversation, but her voice is never raised; carefully modulated, precise. This morning, she tells me musingly, a radio interviewer asked her when she was last happy. And when she was last happy was this morning, as she was the previous morning and probably will be tomorrow morning and the one after that, buoyed by what she calls ‘the happy gene’. ‘I woke up and put the blinds up and saw this gorgeous view of blue skies, wonderful mountain tops, with all these beautiful white mansions and trees, and on one side I can see the ocean and on the other I can see the mountains. What’s not to be happy about?’
This ability to find contentment in the moment is probably critical in someone whose globetrotting existence does not, as she points out to me, include as much work as her contemporaries Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Vanessa Redgrave, but is undeniably busy nevertheless. Collins divides the year between homes in London, Los Angeles, New York and the south of France. If she dislikes the lengthy security checks of commercial airports, she makes no complaint about the rigours of constant travel (although I note later that her Twitter page describes her as ‘Actress, Writer, Producer, Wife, Mother, Grandmother. Much travelled. Exhausted’). It was ever thus. Her favourite childhood game was ‘to turn the nursery table upside down and each corner was a different country: India, Japan, America and France, depending on how I felt.’ In her imagination, she peopled those exotic locales with her dolls. She is a wanderer – she refers to her nomadic lifestyle – but she gives no indication of being a woman on a quest, searching for that elusive something. Her attitude towards her childhood is typical, describing it as ‘happy up to a point’. It was the early days of the war and her parents, Elsa, a dance teacher, and Joseph, a theatrical agent, had to evacuate her ‘eight or nine times. I had constantly to make new friends at school and that’s not easy. But my childhood certainly worked for me.’
Nor would she change the pattern of her life. ‘I don’t consider my lifestyle hectic – it’s the way I’ve always lived my life.’ On the contrary, days after her 11th wedding anniversary – ‘And they said it wouldn’t last!!!’ she tweets – she is a woman who is enjoying one of the happiest periods of a long and eventful life.
We drink espresso – again Collins adds sugar. At adjoining tables sit Esther Shapero, the creator of Dynasty, and one of David Niven’s sons. On the pavement outside, Percy is waiting alongside the car and smiling. His smiles are for both of us, inclusive, friendly. It is a brief encounter, an exchange of pleasantries, no more. Collins discusses a photograph and turns to leave. Lunch is finished.
One Night with Joan opens a nine-city tour in Northampton on April 6 and runs from April 12 to 28 at Leicester Square Theatre, London. All dates are
I see Gibson first, tall & tanned, he does not come into the restaurant but peers through the open door, presumably to check that I have arrived. Perhaps he tips his wife the wink. Fleetingly I think I catch a glimmer of something protective in his very presence and the attitude it implies. As hunches go it’s evanescent but curiously moving none the less.
And then there she is, understatedly elegant in a white straw fedora from Macy’s, a black-and-white shirt over white jeans (bought in the market in St Tropez, she later tells me), and everything springs into action: restaurateur, waitresses, me – the first coolly in control, the second smiling, while I scatter across the banquette sunglasses, notes, mobile and pencils. Other diners shift in their seats. It is not that Il Piccolino comes to a standstill, but a ripple temporarily stirs the calm. Only Collins herself behaves quite normally. Even her greeting – just, perceptibly, remote – seems to strike the right note.
It was during the West End run of Noël Coward’s Private Lives in 1990, in which Collins played the lead role of Amanda Prynne, that fellow actress Maria Aitken described her as ‘a miracle of preservation’. That tag may or may not have been intended as a compliment. It captured nevertheless the ring of the truth both then and, as I can see for myself, now. Aitken said what many thought. For us Brits the longevity of the Collins allure is indeed a minor national miracle, explored in magazine columns as well as a number of Collins’s own lucratively glossy books with titles such as My Secrets and Joan’s Way: Looking Good, Feeling Great.
The ongoing preservation of this Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty has, in its small way, formed a topic of fascinated speculation in British gossip since Collins’s glory days as the vengeful mega-bitch Alexis Carrington in the 1980s super-soap Dynasty. Collins is unfazed. Her constant mantra has been that her appearance is a statement of how she feels about herself (‘If you look sloppy and slobby and dirty and unkempt…’); that, disliking needles, she has never undergone cosmetic surgery (‘Plastic surgery is the plain woman’s revenge’); and that she hated her single dalliance with Botox (‘horrible, I loathed it’).
On a hot Saturday lunchtime in LA, in the soft light that filters through the banana palms, she is as instantly recognisable as… Joan Collins. All this with a degree of understatement to boot, settling herself at the head of the table, smiling at the waitress and the restaurateur, with whom she is on easy terms, shuffling sunglasses and handbag (Chanel, signature quilted leather in white, if you’re wondering); the manoeuvre, as one theatre critic once described her, ‘remarkably devoid of look-at-me posturing’: no swagger, no swank, no suggestion of a performance.
The woman in front of me made her first film, aged 19, in 1951. The following year she posed for the black-and-white portraits by Cornel Lucas that appear in the background of the main picture of this article. In 1955, after Marilyn Monroe turned down the role, Collins played the lead in a film called The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing: Evelyn Nesbit, a dazzling young model and chorus girl who inspires among the men in her life a tornado of macho jealousy. One reviewer described her as ‘startlingly beautiful and sexy’. With a seven-year contract with Twentieth Century Fox under her belt, she teetered on the brink of Hollywood superstardom. It never quite happened. Collins had been puffed as Fox’s answer to Elizabeth Taylor, but it was Taylor who bagged the better roles as well as the plaudits (how she lost out to Taylor for the role of Cleopatra in 1960 is among Collins’s anecdotes in One Night with Joan). In the end, Fox declined to renew its contract.
Collins (right) in Dynasty with her co-star Linda Evans (REX FEATURES)
Twenty years later she got there, thanks to Dynasty and Alexis Carrington, that masterclass in vampish high camp which was partly inspired by the ‘very clever business acumen of Donald Trump’; she was aided by recent starring roles in the hugely successful adaptations of her sister Jackie’s books The Stud and The Bitch. Over the course of eight years the role earned her a succession of Golden Globe nominations and, in 1983, the award for Best Actress in a TV Series (Drama). In her 50s Collins found herself to be one of the most famous women on the planet.
Along the way she married and divorced four times. She had two children with Anthony Newley – the writer Tara, born in 1963, and the artist Sacha, bornin 1965 – and, in 1971, a daughter Katyana with her third husband, Ron Kass. The rest, as they say, is history and not a topic on which she herself appears to dwell, save in the super-slick format of her one-woman show, devised with Gibson seven years ago and subsequently toured across the globe.
In the case of most actresses on the brink of their ninth decade, an illustrated backward glance of this sort would inspire a degree of pathos. Not Collins. There is a bravado quality to One Night with Joan, a strutting chutzpah in keeping with the ballsy but kittenish hauteur she typically turns on for TV chat shows. The Collins who emerges from this carefully crafted vehicle, which is constantly added to, updated, altered and refined, is formidable but very funny. And why not? She remains, as that 1950s reviewer appraised her, ‘startlingly beautiful’. ‘People come to see the show to be entertained,’ she says, ‘and it is very entertaining.’ She pauses. ‘And I think they might want to know something about me.
‘I took control of my image from shortly after I left Twentieth Century Fox,’ she continues. ‘They put me in those wigs, dreadful wigs, and painted my face. I was in my 20s – early 20s – and I looked 40. I had to conform to so much.’ Freed from studio demands, she ditched the conformity and developed an aesthetic of her own, which has since acquired an iconic quality. The Collins look does not change: smokily ringed green eyes in a heart-shaped pale face with a gash of bright lipstick. The portrait that accompanies this piece, taken with bright, bright lighting but not, Collins insists, heavily retouched, reiterates that story.
Collins starred in adaptations of The Bitch and The Stud in the 1970s (REX FEATURES)
On the day we meet the lipstick is pink, very pink. Subtly her white hat shades her face. To this untrained eye her face conspicuously lacks the plump, blancmange-skin sheen of the facelift, and the effect is impressive and lovely. Although I feel uncomfortable subjecting her appearance to such forensic scrutiny, I remind myself that this is part of the point. Had her looks faded, it is unlikely Joan Collins would remain so conspicuously in the public eye, still making films, TV appearances, commercials. She sweeps aside my mention of her approaching birthday. Shall we say it quickly? I suggest. Her reply is softly spoken but deeply felt: ‘I don’t want to say it at all.’ She really means it. ‘I refuse to be defined by my age. In 1913, 40 was old and most people were dead at 60. In 100 years’ time, centenarians will be a dime a dozen.’
There is a dilemma here. That Joan Collins continues to look so much younger than she is does not detract from her age: instead it draws our attention to it. Her face is proof of the victory of what reveals itself as a very stubborn philosophy of happiness. ‘I’m not one of those people who analyse everything, not at all,’ she says. ‘I don’t think where I’m going to be in five years, I think where I’m going to be in two weeks, because I’m going to be in New York. And I try to make each day like a mini-lifetime – to achieve something and to enjoy something. I live in the present totally – and the future: who knows what the future is?’ That she says this matter-of-factly underlines her sincerity. She speaks lightly, however. If I feel there is an intimate quality to our lunch, I am probably deluding myself, swayed by a personality I find both warm and sympathetic and her utter lack of stridency.
Nothing in Joan Collins suggests the older person clinging on to youth. She simply is, in some odd, indefinable, possibly unique way, young. She is different and exhilaratingly so. Or perhaps it is a characteristic of Collins women: her younger sister Jackie, the multi-million-selling author, suggests a similar unflagging agelessness. ‘Jackie and I are terribly close. She’s more fun to be with than practically any other person than my husband.’ In Los Angeles the sisters meet up two or three times a week, often for mid-morning cinema trips.
Collins with her sister Jackie seen here in the 1950s (REX FEATURES)
She dislikes ladettes and reality television (‘Everybody is “amazing”. “I’m living my dream”,’ she parodies). She is disappointed by new films, in which ‘each one has more explosives, more gun violence, more blood, more murder’. She ‘loathes’ political correctness, investing the verb with a long-drawn-out fruitiness in that instantly recognisable voice which has also failed to age. She loves ‘the dressing-up box’, caviar and private jets: the costly trappings of old-fashioned stardom. Her grande-luxe version of star quality would have been recognisable to any one of the Hollywood greats with whom she worked at the outset of her career: Bette Davis, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Paul Newman. ‘I’m a frustrated florist,’ she admits,
and at one point in our conversation I catch a glimpse of the picture on her phone screen: a close-up of a single blood-red rose. She gives money to charity and involves herself in a number of causes, notably breast cancer and children’s learning disabilities, without fandango. She considers the Royal family ‘magnificent’, especially the Queen. And yet, when she tells me, ‘I think I’m quite modern,’ I agree with her.
Collins drinks iced tea – with sugar added – and water and eats a plate of steamed, sautéed broccoli, nothing else. It is what she always orders at Il Piccolino and the chef knows how she likes it, nice and soft. ‘So good for you,’ she announces. It is symptomatic of an approach towards diet and wellbeing that is careful but unhysterical (as per a recent tweet: ‘Today’s tip: serve your food on a smaller plate – you’ll eat less’). She works out regularly, uses a trainer and eats healthily but unfaddishly, true to her ‘British no-nonsense gene’. She is a fully paid- up member of what must be a remarkably elite club of ladies of her age who can still do the splits.
Occasionally the sound of the traffic does its best to hijack our conversation, but her voice is never raised; carefully modulated, precise. This morning, she tells me musingly, a radio interviewer asked her when she was last happy. And when she was last happy was this morning, as she was the previous morning and probably will be tomorrow morning and the one after that, buoyed by what she calls ‘the happy gene’. ‘I woke up and put the blinds up and saw this gorgeous view of blue skies, wonderful mountain tops, with all these beautiful white mansions and trees, and on one side I can see the ocean and on the other I can see the mountains. What’s not to be happy about?’
This ability to find contentment in the moment is probably critical in someone whose globetrotting existence does not, as she points out to me, include as much work as her contemporaries Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Vanessa Redgrave, but is undeniably busy nevertheless. Collins divides the year between homes in London, Los Angeles, New York and the south of France. If she dislikes the lengthy security checks of commercial airports, she makes no complaint about the rigours of constant travel (although I note later that her Twitter page describes her as ‘Actress, Writer, Producer, Wife, Mother, Grandmother. Much travelled. Exhausted’). It was ever thus. Her favourite childhood game was ‘to turn the nursery table upside down and each corner was a different country: India, Japan, America and France, depending on how I felt.’ In her imagination, she peopled those exotic locales with her dolls. She is a wanderer – she refers to her nomadic lifestyle – but she gives no indication of being a woman on a quest, searching for that elusive something. Her attitude towards her childhood is typical, describing it as ‘happy up to a point’. It was the early days of the war and her parents, Elsa, a dance teacher, and Joseph, a theatrical agent, had to evacuate her ‘eight or nine times. I had constantly to make new friends at school and that’s not easy. But my childhood certainly worked for me.’
Nor would she change the pattern of her life. ‘I don’t consider my lifestyle hectic – it’s the way I’ve always lived my life.’ On the contrary, days after her 11th wedding anniversary – ‘And they said it wouldn’t last!!!’ she tweets – she is a woman who is enjoying one of the happiest periods of a long and eventful life.
We drink espresso – again Collins adds sugar. At adjoining tables sit Esther Shapero, the creator of Dynasty, and one of David Niven’s sons. On the pavement outside, Percy is waiting alongside the car and smiling. His smiles are for both of us, inclusive, friendly. It is a brief encounter, an exchange of pleasantries, no more. Collins discusses a photograph and turns to leave. Lunch is finished.
One Night with Joan opens a nine-city tour in Northampton on April 6 and runs from April 12 to 28 at Leicester Square Theatre, London. All dates are
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