“Fame And Glamour Are Ephemeral… I Never Chased That”: An Audience With Dame Joan Collins..
Wallis, Duchess of Windsor: one thinks of the sapphires and the Schiaparelli couture; seated dinners, for 16, on Sèvres porcelain; the Beaton portraits, the Belvedere parties, the pugs. One doesn’t, in the main, picture an isolated invalid, wasting away in her powder-blue bedroom above the Bois de Boulogne while a malignant attorney pilfered her Cartier Panthères, ousted her private secretaries and threatened to publish her letters to King Edward VIII without her consent.
“Only that,” Joan Collins says flatly, “is exactly what happened.” We’re shuttered in a plush study of the dame’s stucco Belgravia home, watched over by several dozen other Joans: her feline gaze stares out from a novelty Joel & Son cushion, patterned with 1950s glamour shots of her (“They made one of Sophia Loren, one of Brigitte Bardot and one of me”); from silver-framed snaps with her fifth (“and forever”) husband, manager and producer Percy Gibson; from shelves lined with the six memoirs she has written, the indexes of which are better reading than most actual biographies: “Major, John – JC advises upon spectacles and sex appeal”; “Minnelli, Liza – a gauche tendency”; “Moore, Demi – her thighs”.
Leaning against a vintage sable throw, the real Collins, bare-faced and wig-less, sits beside me in Adidas trackies and a diamond-encrusted crucifix roughly the size of my palm, having just completed a session with her personal trainer. “If you don’t wind the clock up, the clock’s not going to work,” she tells me of her attitude to fitness, her voice that crisply enunciated, faintly anachronistic RP. And the clock needs to work. Collins, who, among her many unusual roles, steered mega-soap Dynasty by the shoulder pads for much of the 1980s and about to star as the ur-American divorcée to embitter the grey suits of Buckingham Palace and nearly dismantle a monarchy.
Directed by Four Weddings and a Funeral’s Mike Newell and written by Louise Fennell – wife of “King of Bling” Theo, mother of Saltburn’s Emerald and a dear friend of Joan’s from Bollinger-fuelled nights at Tramp 1.0 – My Duchess is part royal biopic, part psycho-biddy horror, with a touch of erotic thriller and a whole heap of camp; What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? meets Single White Female, but with a victim who precipitated an abdication crisis, a villain played by Blue Velvet’s Isabella Rossellini, and a screenplay full of gags about “vodka-based” diets and a benzo-wielding médecin known as “Dr Death”.
It’s a film Collins has been trying to make since 1989, when she first toured the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s neoclassical pile in the 16th arrondissement, and began to reassess what HL Mencken once called “the best news story since the Resurrection”. If you think the recent travails of the royal family have bordered on existential, try 1936, when, just months before his formal coronation, King Edward VIII was given an ultimatum: the Sovereign’s Orb or his twice-married, Baltimore-raised mistress. He chose Wallis, despite her begging him to do otherwise, marrying her at a Loire Valley château and spending the rest of his life in languorous exile with “the woman he loved” – an accident of history that transformed the nature of the British monarchy in perpetuity. (Wallis and Edward, with their penchant for café society and Place Vendôme, would have been rather different royal majesties to their replacements, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, who spent the war wearing out their country tweeds at Balmoral and shooting rats for target practice while the Luftwaffe swarmed.)
When Edward found himself demoted, post-abdication, to a mere duke, he and Wallis still lived in gilded splendour as if in their own make-believe court; before his death in 1972, Villa Windsor was filled with so many Aubusson rugs, Limoges bibelots, Viger clocks and Augsburg unicorns that an eventual Sotheby’s auction of their possessions lasted nine days. When Joan visited the Paris villa, the mansion still had the feel of a museum, if not a mausoleum; there, preserved as if the Windsors had just stepped out for a stroll in the Bois, were Edward’s imperial seals and regimental swords, Wallis’s Molyneux suits and monogrammed negligées. (“Well, of course, I loved the Duchess from the moment I laid eyes on her satin knickers,” says Joan.) Conspicuously absent, however, was any account of the Duchess’s life in the 14 years between his passing and her own. “So I asked their valet, Sydney, ‘What happened to her?’ and he turned sorrowful, and said, ‘Well, she got close with a lady who took control of her, but I really don’t like talking about it.’”
No one much did, so Collins began her own research into Suzanne Blum (Rossellini), a Hollywood litigator who represented the likes of Cary Grant and Jean Cocteau, won Rita Hayworth her divorce settlement from Prince Aly Khan, and whose relationship with the ailing Wallis was memorably described by one royal biographer as that of a “necrophiliac”. In truth, no one is entirely certain what motivated Maître Blum’s machinations in the Duchess’s twilight years – not least because, under Blum’s watch, scarcely a soul made it past Villa Windsor’s crumbling façade. Yet the accepted facts have a gothic cast to them. In 1973, frustrated with Lord Mountbatten’s (Charles Dance) attempts to retrieve the Duke’s possessions for the royal family, Wallis made Blum, less than two years her junior, her sole legal representative – a position expanded, as the Duchess’s health deteriorated, to include power of attorney. Subsisting on iced spirits, in and out of the American Hospital of Paris, and slipping into senility, Wallis had no way of preventing Blum from acting on her “behalf”: holding clandestine sales of the Duchess’s Louis Vuitton cases and the Duke’s jade-handled daggers, barring everyone from Mitford sisters to Martin Charteris’s royal envoys from visiting her, and donating auction proceeds from her Burmese rubies and cabochon emeralds to the Pasteur Institute.
And so the idea for My Duchess began to form in Collins’s mind. “It was 10, 20, 30 years ago, when everybody said, ‘Oh, there are no roles for women over a certain age. You have to find your own subject.’ So I thought, ‘Well, surely this is a good subject.’” Still, it would take until 2023 to find a producer through – of all possible connections – His Majesty King Charles III, the Duke of Windsor’s great-nephew. “One day I sat next to this really nice gentleman at a dinner for The Prince’s Trust at Claridge’s, and told him the story,” she recalls, “and he said, ‘I’ll think about it, blah, blah, blah,’ and then I never heard from him again.” Until she did. The nice gentleman was, in fact, Broadway linchpin John Gore, he of the 25 Tony wins, who had just launched his own namesake film studio in London. Within 72 hours of reading Fennell’s script, he decided to greenlight it. “Well,” says Joan, “Louise and I were jumping up and down like schoolgirls.” (King Charles, whose primary impression of Villa Windsor was that it contained “the most dreadful American guests I have ever seen”, has since received a letter of thanks.)
So began a forensic recreation of the Duke and Duchess’s “Arcadia in Paris”, at Ealing Studios and a Palladian seat in Hertfordshire, with the château’s 14 rooms and fragrant gardens reimagined as they would have stood in the years when Diana Vreeland and Cole Porter were among the so-called dreadful Americans who joined the Windsors for sous-cloche savouries and Steinway singalongs, bombes glacées and baccarat. (Coincidentally, the real Villa Windsor will open as a tourist attraction next year and might well take cues from the My Duchess set, down to Wallis’s snuffling grumble of spoilt pugs, each of whom, naturally, had to pass a chemistry test with Joan.)
When, last June, I drop by during filming, I find Rossellini delighting in the minutiae of the library. “Oh!” she cries, lifting an imitation Meissen lapdog from the mantelpiece, “this one has a sort of toupee. Handsome, handsome.” Rossellini speaks in an ecstatic tone familiar to anyone who watches her social media dispatches about the heritage breeds she keeps at her Brookhaven, Long Island, farm (a Jacob sheep named Greta Garbo, a Poland rooster known as Andy Warhol). Her manner is so jubilant it’s actually quite startling, a short while later, to see her transform into the menacing Blum, glowering over a corpse-like “Wallis” in a gilt-framed bed, Collins’s face peeping wanly above the moiré silk coverlet. “An NAI scene for me,” Joan tosses after Newell shouts “Cut.” She explains: “No Acting Involved.”
In Rossellini’s hands, the more violin-screech moments of My Duchess are, by turns, horrifying and hysterical. “It’s very original, the script, in terms of the tone, but also because these two old ladies are in their 70s,” she enthuses back in her dressing room, still in Gertrude Stein-inspired tailoring that, along with Joan’s Dior-esque shifts and diamond brooches, were sourced by three-time Oscar-winning costume designer Sandy Powell (Shakespeare in Love, The Aviator, The Young Victoria). Although Rossellini stresses that her character’s behaviour is more grounded in thespian fantasy than historical reality, she’s given endless thought to what triggered Blum’s “psychological obsession” with the Duchess, one composed of attraction and repulsion in equal measure. (Apart from anything else, the Jewish Blum, who had to flee to America when the Nazis invaded France, can’t have thought much of Wallis’s confidante Diana Mosley, a fascist sympathiser played by Miranda Richardson.) As a prominent lawyer from the 1920s onwards, Rossellini points out, Blum would have been forced to repress her more “feminine” traits just to keep herself in work, “So her falling in love with the Duchess, who everyone says was incredibly seductive, was probably also her falling in love with her own femininity,” albeit through the questionable method of eyeing up Wallis’s Mabé pearls and Maximilian sables. “We’ve discussed a lot, ‘Is she a lesbian?’ but to me it’s more complex than that.”
The complexity is welcome. As much as Rossellini (and the Academy) enjoyed her seven minutes of screen time as Sister Agnes in Edward Berger’s 2024 papal drama Conclave, it’s a relief “to finally be able to play a meaty role instead of a supporting one”. Even for the daughter of Ingrid Bergman and the muse of David Lynch, it’s been more challenging to find parts with real heft to them past middle age – though she’s achieved considerable recognition for the ones she’s landed, including a first Oscar nomination aged 72. “Go figure,” she notes drolly. (For her part, Joan was delighted with her “ball-of-fire” costar – though, “I did have a moment of pause when I had to tell Ingrid Bergman’s daughter to bugger off.”) “After 50,” Rossellini continues, “whatever you do, you’re asked the question, ‘Why do you do it?’ and the answer is: ‘Well, because I like to work.’ Or people say: ‘How do you age gracefully?’ Well, I haven’t aged gracefully or ungracefully; I’ve just aged. Everybody ages. You can do plastic surgery, or not; you can dye your hair, or not; you can manoeuvre it however you like, but you’re going to age.” In fact, it’s My Duchess’s warnings about the dangers of ageism that sold Rossellini on the project. Strip away Wallis’s Harry Winston hardware and Blum’s Hollywood Rolodex, and the story is grimly familiar. “We’ve all known a person who’s gone into decline at the end of their life, and there’s been someone taking care of them, and at first you think, ‘Oh, thank God,’ and only later you find out, ‘Oh no, oooh dear…’”
For all its macabre comedy, My Duchess begs the question: how could one of the most notorious figures of the 20th century be abused to such a degree without anyone stepping in? “I, who had sought no place in history, would now be assured of one,” Wallis lamented post-abdication. “An appalling one, carved out by blind prejudice.” She was right. For the next 36 years, the press, variously adoring and abhorring, reported on every detail of the Duchess’s existence: which cattleyas she kept on her Rococo consoles; how long she mourned the death of her Cairn terrier, Slippers (“at one time the best known and most photographed dog in Britain”, the New York Times eulogised solemnly); what featured on her dinner menus (lobster salad, pommes de terre Ritz, cold raspberry soufflés) – only for her to disappear from public view in the mid-1970s, her body and mind failing, almost without comment.
For most royal watchers, the saga of “that woman”, as the Queen Mother called her, ended the day she attended the duke’s funeral at St George’s Chapel, stoic beneath her Givenchy veil. Without Edward or any family to protect her, she became a historical footnote while still alive, blamed for the abdication she tried desperately to prevent, with a touch of schadenfreude accompanying reports of her decline and isolation.
“I’m always fascinated by women who everybody says are nasty people,” Collins reflects when I bring up this particular injustice in her study. “And when you strip it all off, you find out that they’re not really.” She could, of course, be speaking about herself. A hazard of being watched by 80 million Americans on Dynasty is that Collins has never quite been able to shed her “superbitch” Alexis Carrington persona; for many casting directors, she will forever be wrestling Linda Evans’s Krystle into a lily pond or boxing with Diahann Carroll’s Dominique over “burnt” Champagne. “If I’d ever met Wallis, I could have commiserated with her about how the press treated me while I was playing Alexis,” she adds. “I mean, when [Dynasty producer] Aaron Spelling said, ‘Joan is Alexis,’ that haunted me for so long. I said, ‘Aaron, why did you say that? You know that’s not true,’ and he said, ‘Honey, it gets headlines.’”
She’s never had a major Hollywood role since, despite being one of 20th Century Fox’s more lucrative studio girls in the 1950s: starring opposite Bette Davis as a ruffed courtier in The Virgin Queen and leading the Ben-Hur-esque epic Land of the Pharaohs, complete with a screenplay by William Faulkner and 10,000 Egyptian extras. Yet her own typecasting and sexualisation, both on and off screen, began long before Dynasty, starting, in fact, at Ealing Studios, where she found herself christened “Britain’s Bad Girl” after shooting a few J Arthur Rank pictures as an ingenuous 17-year-old.
Now, 75 years and more than twice as many acting credits on, she’s back on the same lot, still working. Yet even now, the first sentence of her Encyclopaedia Britannica page includes the word “sexpot”. Surely that sort of pigeonholing grates? Collins summons a withering stare. “[In the ’90s], I did [a BBC adaptation] of Noël Coward’s Tonight at 8:30, where I played eight different roles, ranging from the elderly hag to the socialite to the abused housewife – but it doesn’t matter what you do. They have this image of you.”
Although her Miss Havisham-like turn in My Duchess might finally shatter that image. “Oh, for at least half the film I’m a wreck,” she crows, visibly thrilled. “Just more and more hideous: ageing make-up, long, grey hair, straggly nightgowns.” Did she find that hard? “No.” Really? “Fame and glamour are ephemeral… I never chased that. I always chased being a good actress, and work, because I was the breadwinner for most of my life. I still am.”
And, in fact, she tells me politely, she really has to be getting on. Tomorrow she’s off to Beverly Hills, before decamping to Cancun, then it’s on to Saint-Tropez at some point (“Our villa there’s like Fawlty Towers – there’s so many guests coming in and out”). Oh, and she’s got another film starting production; and her three children and 15 godchildren to see (“though Cara’s difficult to get ahold of – Cara Delevingne”); and a seventh memoir to finish (working title: The Collins Dictionary), plus red carpets to prep for, though she finds those quite hard going now. “You have to get your face done. You have to get your eyelashes on. You have to choose the right dress. It’s just endless, before you even go.”
She’ll do it all, however – the face, the lashes, the dress, even “the selfies” – for My Duchess. A member of the Silent Generation and a child of the Blitz, Collins is given neither to introspection (“Certainly I don’t analyse myself”) nor sentimentality (“Oh no – no, no, no”), but she will admit to a certain pride in this film. “I absolutely hate watching myself,” she insists. “I always have done, but, you know… ” and here Joan Collins, Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, leans in and turns almost bashful. “I thought I was rather good, actually.” She pauses, straightens up, adjusts her crucifix. “This was my passion project and it came to fruition. My other passion project, which never did, was Cleopatra.” A resigned sigh.
“And then my friend Elizabeth Taylor got it.”
Main image: costumes (throughout), by Sandy Powell. Joan’s hair and make-up: Niall Monteith-Mann. Isabella’s hair and make-up: Nadia Stacey. Nails: Imarni. Digital artwork: May Global.
