Baz Bamigboye/DeadlineEXCLUSIVE: Dame Joan Collins has fire in her belly. After a career that has spanned 75 years from post-war Rank Organisation starlet to Dynasty diva, this self-described “jobbing actor” has a hunger, ambition and energy that thespians half her age, younger even, would envy.
For the Cannes Film Festival, the legendary dame, who doesn’t care much for walking, is taking dancing lessons to enable her to glide with gusto into the Palais de Festival for the opening night gala on May 12. “I thought I want to just be able to get on the red carpet and not be a lump,” she tells Deadline in an exclusive interview.
“I’ve never liked walking. Whenever I saw that the Queen or the Queen Mother were having walks, I thought, ‘How can they do that? How boring?’ The only time I want to walk is when I’m walking around Selfridges department store,” she declares.
French actor Laurent Lafitte (The Count of Monte-Cristo, Elle) will escort her past the phalanx of photographers, up those tricky steps and on into the Grand Auditorium to witness Lord of the Rings filmmaker Peter Jackson receive an honorary lifetime achievement Palme d’Or and then to watch Pierre Salvadori’s romantic comedy The Electric Kiss.
Choosing to take Lafitte’s arm rather than take her husband Percy Gibson’s is deliberate.
The dashing Frenchman plays a key role opposite Dame Joan in My Duchess, a searing drama once it gets into its stride, directed by Mike Newell from a script by Louise Fennell. It reveals the tortured final years of Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, the American divorcee who found herself thrust between king and country when Edward VIII renounced the British throne to be with “the woman I love,” as he famously put it in his abdication speech.
In her day, the Duchess, draped in exquisite couture gowns, oozed élan, so it’s perhaps appropriate that she be portrayed by an actress who matches her in the glamor stakes.
But Dame Joan does more, much more, than just parade around as the Duchess: She inhabits her.
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| Joan Collins as the Duchess of Windsor in ‘My Duchess’Rory Mulvey/John Gore Studios |
My Duchess, the first film produced by John Gore Studios, the film company established by Broadway powerhouse John Gore, will have market screenings at Cannes, then on May 13, Gore will host a luncheon party for Dame Joan and Isabella Rossellini, who plays Maitre Suzanne Blum, the Duchess’s lawyer, who, instead of caring for her client, chose instead to taunt and torment her.
In the film, Blum’s psychological cruelty unravels the Duchess mentally and physically, causing her to wilt before our eyes. Dame Joan captures that downward spiral by stripping herself of the countenance of glamor that made the Duchess so striking. Dame Joan had no hesitation, she says, in allowing the film’s “glam squad,” as she fondly calls the hair and makeup department, to peel away her allure.
Ordinarily, no one but her messes with the face, her bread and butter since she enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1950. But for this film, which she has pushed to get made for 30 years, she insists, “I didn’t care how I looked.”
For the first time ever, she handed her visage for others to deface in the name of art. “I didn’t do my hair or my makeup. I just laid back and they did it,” she says. “They put me in the clothes. I had no say in anything. I just said, ‘You do what you want me to look like.’ I put myself totally in the hands of the glam squad.” Collins adds that over the years she had pored over “thousands” of photographs featuring the Duchess, sharing her spoils with three-time Oscar-winning costume designer Sandy Powell, who co-designed the film’s costumes with Charlotte Law.
“I knew exactly how I thought she should look, but I also agreed with Sandy that she was now in her declining years, so she wouldn’t have been so glamorous. She was also a stick insect, honestly Baz. There’s some movie film of her in a bathing suit. It looks like she just came out of a concentration camp,” she says, lowering her voice.
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| Isabella Rossellini and Joan Collins in ‘My Duchess’Rory Mulvey/John Gore Studios |
With the Duke of Windsor’s death in 1972, the film traces his widow’s lonely last years. It’s chilling to see how Blum treats her when she’s ill. She says that during the filming of a scene where Blum is being abusive toward her, ”I had to remember that this bullying woman is being played by Isabella Rossellini, who is Ingrid Bergman’s daughter! Off set, she was marvelous.”
“You see, nobody knows that she had a stroke,” Dame Joan reports. “She lay there in bed. All of her jewelry was gone. All her paintings were gone. Everything. The house was falling apart. It was Miss Havisham. And she lay there deaf, dumb, blind as well. She was blind and nobody came to see her for eight or nine years. How shocking was that? They stopped everybody going to see her. All of these things are true, and it’s elder abuse of the worst kind, of the worst kind,” she hisses.
Dame Joan says: “I know people whose parents have been robbed, literally robbed because all the people are not into all of the phones and the online banking, all of that. My kids, Tara and Alexander and Katy, they were all raised at school. I can’t fucking type. I had to do Siri. And of course I’ve got the nails, so I can’t easily type,“ she says, displaying her crimson-painted talons.
“Luckily, Percy’s expert at all of that,” she continues. “I can’t do any of this, but most people over 60 can’t. And there’s a lot of us.”
She says that m
ost people over a certain age in London are fearful of going out. ”It’s a pretty scary world, isn’t it?”
Yet, Dame Joan never has struck one as being fearful of anyone or anything. There’s a warrior woman underneath the pricey cashmere that adorns her.
Nodding, she responds that she’s not “a fearful person. I think I’m very street-savvy and knowledgeable about things. I’ve been there, done that, got the T-shirt, as they say.”
I’d arrived early for our tête-à -tête at London’s posho Peninsula Hotel, located on Hyde Park Corner, a stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace — because Joanie, as my Brit editor in Los Angeles likes to call her, doesn’t suffer fools, and I’d rather not incur an icy glare.
Dame Joan and Gibson, who’ll soon celebrate their silver wedding anniversary, live around the corner in Belgravia, and they’re clearly regular patrons, judging by how low the head waiter genuflects when her name is cited. He leads the way to a banquette discreetly nestled by a huge picture widow that looks out to a splendid view of Wellington Arch with its equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington erected on top of it.
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| Joan Collins as the Duchess of Windsor in ‘My Duchess’Rory Mulvey/John Gore Studios |
The dame and I have a little history too, having covered, not always kindly, her late-1970s particularly “crappy crap” years, as she terms them, with The Stud and The Bitch, both based on her late sister Jackie Collins’ bonk-busting books. Later, when based in New York, Kelvin McKenzie, my then-editor at The Sun, had a habit of ringing me up at 3 a.m. full of madcap ideas like jumping on a flight to take Joan Collins flowers because he’d heard she has a cold. Well, by this time she was huge as Alexis, so any excuse to get her in the paper.
The fun one was being dispatched to Saint-Tropez to seek an interview about her acrimonious split from Swedish singer Peter Holm. “Oh, the Swede,” she says with a venomous edge. “Michael Caine called him the Swedish comedian, about as funny as this glass,” she trills.
Later on during that assignment, I encountered her on a private beach. Flowers were presented, a withering quote about the Swede was uttered, and a suitable photograph was taken. She was happy.
Stephen Sondheim’s Follies number “Good times and bum times, I’ve seen them all. And, my dear, I’m still here,” has her written all over it.
What accounts for the longevity of her career, I ask as she sips an Americana — with cold milk — and toys with a plate of smoked salmon, slices of avocado and fries (my fries).
“Well, first of all,” she begins, “I don’t think you have to want to be famous. If you want to be famous, you’re going to be miserable. I don’t care about being famous. When I was extremely famous, it was when I was doing Dynasty, it was OK. I got mobbed. I couldn’t go and look at the bras in Bloomingdale’s without somebody coming up and saying, ‘Can I have your …’ We didn’t have cell phones then. And I found it a bit irritating, but I thought, ‘This will pass. It ain’t gonna last,’ and then I can go back to just being a jobbing actor, which I did. And so I’ve had very fallow periods in which I’ve been able to live a really great life.”
Chewing around that statement for a millisecond, Dame Joan adds that when she thinks about it, she’s also had “some really horrible experiences,” such as being sued by Random House, and she’s endured “terrible divorces in which my husbands have said horrible things about me and asked for money. And Katy’s accident [her daughter Katyana survived a horrific car accident when she was 8], but I have a great family now. I have great friends, and I have a wonderful husband.”
There are no stars in her eyes, however. “Well, I mean, I don’t consider myself a film star. I consider myself a working actress, whatever epithets they want to say. I’ve done so many things. I’ve done so much TV. I’ve done so much theater. I’ve done a lot more theater than people realize. Not that I care what people realize really, but we have …”
She wants to take the stage show she performs with Gibson back on tour, and she has the chops for it. I’ve seen her many times on stage, but I remember her as the scheming socialite burglar Fay Cheyney in Frederick Lonsdale’s The Last of Mrs. Cheyney at Chichester Festival Theatre, before she transferred with it into the Cambridge Theatre. At the first-night party, she spoke of a new show she’d filmed in L.A. called Dynasty. Not long afterward, I was in NYC, and Collins’ face graced every magazine cover and she appeared night after night on the talk shows.
In the early 1990s she visited the 14-room villa on the edge of in the Bois du Boulogne that once had been home to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
She was shown around by Bahamian-born Sydney Johnson, a former valet and major-domo to the Windsors. “He showed me around, and the place was immaculate. It had all been redone by these people. And he showed me to the the Duchess’ bedroom, bathroom and closet,” she says, pausing to add, “And he opened the closet and showed me some of her dresses, and in the closet were two mannequins, one of the Duchess and one of the Duke.
“He was wearing a kilt. She was wearing a very chic sort of dress, and they were teeny. They were both about 5 foot. And I said, ‘Is this their size?’ And he said, ‘Well, more or less.’ And then he said, ‘Do you want to see her lingerie?’ In the drawers were these exquisite panties and camisoles, all of a sort of very soft satin peach and cream,” she explains.
All this was a prelude to what Johnson had to tell her next. ”He said, ‘I was there, and Madame Blum came in and she destroyed the Duchess after the former King died. And so he told me all these stories.“
She divulges that Johnson worked for Mohammad Al-Fayed — the father of Dodi Fayed, who died with Princess Diana in the Paris car crash — who had taken on the ownership of the Windsors’ former home in the Bois de Boulogne. ”I know one isn’t supposed to mention his name, is one? He was the owner of Harrods then. Yes. I know he’s sort of unmentionable, but anyway, he was the one, and I went with my friend Jeffrey Lane,” she adds referring to her longtime friend and communications adviser.
Intrigued, she read every tome and article and watched every documentary on the Duchess and her lawyer. Years went by, and the writer Louise Fennell was one of many she’d spoken to about the Windsor story. “She said, ‘Oh, I’d love to write that.’ And so she started writing an outline. And then you know how it is, you’re doing other things and it was on the back burner, but it was always in my mind.”
Fortuitously, she was seated next to John Gore at a King’s Trust dinner and asked if he’d like to read a script. “I was really hustling!” The likes of Netflix boss Ted Sarandos, had “humored” her, she says, only never to be heard from again.
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| (C) Venetia Scott |
A year or so later, Gore, who’d just set up John Gore Studios, called for the script.
He rang her, she says, and “he said, ‘I think I want to do this.’ It is miraculous that this happened so fast, even though I’d been sort of thinking about it and pushing it and having this sweat for more than 30 years.”
Gore tells us that he wondered beforehand whether or not Dame Joan has the same “vivaciousness” she displayed in her Dynasty days. “I saw all the magic in action,” he recalls, “and I was thinking maybe offering her something in a Hammer film because we own Hammer, and she did lots of Hammer stuff.And then she said, “But I’ve been working on this idea for a long time…” And I said, “You’re too good looking for Wallis Simpson.Doesn’t make any sense. “Then she said,”You’re going to see everything come away,no makeup” And that’s when I thought ,okay, this is going to be something unique and special.”
Having read how potty she is abut the Duchess, are the stories true that she acquired a sapphire and diamond broach that once belonged to the Duchess at an auction in Geneva? “No,” she shoots back. Then she smiles and says: ”A friend of mine gave me a scarf of hers that he bought at auction, a beautiful black and white silk scarf.”
I had queried the broach because I once worked on a newspaper, the Daily Mail, and they felled forests to tell the world about every item of jewellery the Duchess ever possessed.
“No, I can’t afford that,” she says of the precious gemstone that was never hers.
Was it Hermès,I enquired of the precious neckwear in question.
“No, it’s not, but it’s exquisite,” she says revealing that it was a gift from Mark Rozzano, a friend of hers, who produced another recent film, A Murder Between Friends, and he’s also “obsessed by the Duchess.”
Giggling, Dame Joan shares that she does have “a complete copy” from Butler & Wilson of the broach designed for the Duchess by Cartier in 1940.
“It’s pink and sapphires, but it’s a fake.But it’s a beautiful fake,” she assures.
There were all kinds of rumors about the Duchess,Dame Joan says. “I mean, there’s so much stuff about her. I had to refine it in my mind,” she says brushing imaginary crumbs from her cashmere, cowl collared coat.
Leaning closer over the table, she drops her voice. “I think he was obsessed by her, and I think his obsession was … He was very funny. He had great pep, he had enormous style, and I think that she was the only person who ever made him hot. You know what I mean? He was able to do that,” she says ripping off a piece of bread and popping it in her mouth, which is perhaps something she wouldn’t have been taught to do when she attended Francis Holland School for Girls in Regent’s Park.
Crikey!
We move onto a safer topic.Is it unfair that the Duchess’s name been maligned all this time, I ask her?
“ So much, so badly,” is her immediate response.
“That’s one of the things that when I was reading about her, and I’ve been reading on and off for a long time, and I always thought, ‘Oh my God’, the hatred that this woman brought upon herself for something that was not her fault. And so in some way, I hope that this film will make people see her in a different light, that she wasn’t the monster bitch that everybody thought. And the family, I mean, particularly the Queen Mother was really horrible,” she splutters.
“I do have the line, which I say Prince Charles was the only one who ever was nice to me,because he was, and he would visit her,” she adds.
She believes in karma and exercise, she says as we move away from the poor Duchess. “I believe in karma and I think you get the face you deserve. I mean, if you booze and smoke cigarettes and eat the wrong food, you’re not going to look so good when you’re over 60 or whatever I am,haha,” she chuckles. “And I do take care of my skin and I do exercise. And I do wear makeup.”
What exercise? Is it yoga?
“Well, I did it this morning. It’s a lot of floor work. It’s balance work and walking,” and she’s training with choreographer Paul Robinson [he was in 42nd Street at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane,way back when with Catherine Zeta Jones] who also showed her some moves for the movie and for the Cannes red carpet.
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| Joan Collins and Isabella Rossellini in ‘My Duchess’Rory Mulvey/John Gore Studios |
When I ask about recent big-screen movies she’s liked, she goes all coy. “Well, I don’t want to be horrible,” she says with a laugh.
Oh, please do,I beg ever so humbly.
“No.No, I’m not going to,” she decides firmly.
But,she pipes up, they went to see Baz Lurhmann’s EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert at BFI IMAX.
“It looked phenomenal, but it made me really sad because I knew Elvis, not very well, but I met him when I first went to Hollywood. He was so beautiful. And they put all these closeups of him sweating and fat. I said to Percy, “ I can’t bear watching the disintegration of a real person.” And he only lived to be 40 something,” she exclaims.
Excessive eating didn’t help,she suggests. “Fried banana sandwiches. Not a good idea,” she tuts just as I reach for another chip.
She relents ove the “horrible” movies and tells me that she didn’t care for The Naked Gun starring Niam Leeson who she “loves.” That film “came and went,it was very disappointing,” she sighs.
Dame Joan loved the films of the ’80s and ’90s. Especially “the Tom Hanks and the Meg Ryan comedies.”
She reckons that she’s watched Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather “about a hundred times,” never tiring of it.
What she enjoys about watching classic movies is the chance ‘to study the actors” and watch the picture over and over again. “Each time I’ll notice something new that the actors have chosen to do.”
Recently she screened Preston Sturgess’s 1941 screwball The Lady Eve with Barbara Stanwyck and “Henry Fonda to do a Cary Grant, she was fantastic Barbara Stanwyck.”
What about Barbra Streisand? “She’s great. I met her when she was 19. I was getting married to Tony [Newley] and he was on Broadway and everybody said “You’ve got to go and see this nineteen -year-old girl at this club, and it was Barbra.”
Bette Davis? “I worked with Bette Davis on The Virgin Queen.She scared me to death. It was my first American film and she kicked me across the set.”
She loves Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson, adores Alan Rickman’s films. “He was such a superb actor where he had to do little, because his face said everything,” she marvels as we chat about Rickman and Thompson in Love Actually. Hugh Grant is on her “wonderful” list as is Brad Pitt. “I think Brad’s a great actor.I think he doesn’t get what he deserves because of his looks.”
She’s a huge fan of Kate Winslet’s.”She’s fantastic! So brave!I couldn’t do that.Stand in a film totally naked,no way,” she says referring to Winslet in Francis Lee’s underrated masterpiece, Ammonite.
I gently argue that Dame Joan has herself been in similar states of undress.“Let’s not go there,” she guffaws.
How much sleep does she get,I venture to ask? “About eight or nine hours,” she replies, except she often wakes at three in the morning and reads a book or scrolls Instagram looking at the images avoiding the comments although she occasionally spots a hate-fuelled missive.
Is she hurt by any of the nasty things that are written on social media? “My children could hurt me. Percy could hurt me but I’m not going to hurt by some keyboard warrior,” she snorts.
This defiant warrior dame sure does rock!
