PRESS UPDATE : THE DAILY TELEGRAPH .. JUNE 5TH 2019 ..

WALDEN’S WORLD

My lunch with Dame Joan in Saint-tropez

• The Daily Telegraph
• 4 Jun 2019

Dress code: Dame Joan Collins with Celia Walden

Lunch with Dame Joan Collins tends to get broken up by a series of star-struck diners crossing the restaurant floor to pay homage. Although entertaining (if looks could kill, these restaurants would be strewn with the corpses of the etiquette cave-people asking Dame Joan for selfies

while she’s eating), this can be frustrating when the Dynasty star is halfway through a particularly juicy anecdote – like the one she kept trying to finish on Saturday.

We were at Club 55, just outside Saint-tropez – a restaurant popularised by Brigitte Bardot in the Sixties – and Dame Joan was recounting the moment she first met the And God Created Woman bombshell.

“I was in my early 20s and sitting in a hotel bar in Rome, surrounded by men, when Brigitte walked in,” Joan recalled.

“She was in this tiny little gingham dress, and almost every man there promptly got up and walked straight over to her.”

Not one to suffer from either jealousy or self-doubt, Dame Joan quietly took in the scene before coming to the only logical conclusion: “I’m going to have to get myself one of those dresses…”