Joan Collins at 90
Last October, when news of Angie Lansbury’s passing broke, myself and the other balding bears Joan Collins employs as human chess pieces fell to our knees. “The dame is dead,” we cried “long live the dame!”
True, there are more luminous studio system survivors. Eva Marie Sinner, Hitchcockian blonde; Rally Round the Flag, Boys! co-star Joanne Woodward; and Shirley MacLaine, her nearly-sister-in-law, to name but three. To say nothing of Sophia Loren. Her refusal to join a struggling soap in its sophomore season gave Dame Joan her most recognisable role. Alexis Carrington Colby on Dynasty. Like Vera Charles, Ms. Collins was “never a great actress, or even a very good one, but she was a great star. Matinee audiences adored her”.
Marilyn is gone. Bette Davis is gone. The players in the chat show fodder Ms. Collins has repeated from time immemorial have long shuffled off this mortal coil. Gone, too, is Elizabeth Taylor, for whom she was not unkindly considered a poor man’s substitute. “Elizabeth Tinker”, if you will. Even as a child, I detected a whiff of bunk about Elizabeth Tinker’s yarns. But that’s what made them compelling! Monroe warning her about “the wolves in Hollywood” (or testing for Cleopatra) was trotted out with mind-numbing regularity. This was her stock-in-trade. Dame Joan’s an upmarket Zsa Zsa Gabor, if slightly more competent as an actress. Riven with hypocrisy, yet iron-willed. Full of joie-de-vivre (and the money with which to indulge it). So shrewd about her “brand” that one-time husband Anthony Newley leered: “To the unwashed public, Joan Collins is a star. But to those who know her, she’s a commodity who would sell her own bowel movement”.
She enters her tenth decade today. Still impossibly glamorous and whip smart. A twentieth century vixen who refuses to be an anomaly in the twenty-first. Unwavering in her stringent political beliefs; fighting a one-woman crusade against the horrors of the modern world. “I’m absolutely a feminist,” she said in 2021 (she’s no more a feminist than the man in the moon) “but I’ll let somebody carry my bags”.
In Dame Joan, we have the enfant terrible candour of a Miriam Margolyes transposed onto a beauty – with multiple marriages to show for it. Joan walked up the aisle only one less time than Henry VIII, though I suspect Bluff King Hal would’ve made her his seventh wife had Sophia Loren not turned him down. “People only started to think I could act when I lost my looks,” Vivien Leigh confessed to the girl who’s been a star since the Rank Organisation signed her aged seventeen. But Joan Collins never had that miraculous breakthrough. She’s always remained the smitten fan who collected movie magazines in wartime London – as her contemporaries, all of whom she’s outlasted, became jaded and effete about the business.
And thank goodness for that!
Many happy returns, dear Joan.