PRESS UPDATE : THE SPECTATOR .. APRIL 1ST 2022

 

Joan Collins

Oscars diary: a jaw-dropping night

Oscar week is intense – and it’s been a while since it’s been as intense. The red carpet is full of eager paparazzi and interviewers waiting for a photo opportunity or a quotable gaffe. My husband and I went to a couple of parties, but the most coveted is the Vanity Fair Oscar viewing dinner at the Annenberg Center. About 100 people are invited by editor Radhika Jones, and we were delighted to be among the chosen few. The ceremony was long and snoozy, and people were scrolling down their phones for entertainment when suddenly one of the most celebrated actors in Tinseltown, Will Smith, rushed to the stage and bashed the comedian Chris Rock in the face. You could almost hear the collective jaw-drops in the silence of that room. Naturally, the next day there was barely a mention in the press of the wonderful Best Picture, Coda, announced by a wheelchair-bound Liza Minnelli, or of the touching speech by the deaf actor Troy Kotzur. Everything was about this outrageous incident.

Breathing in the cool Los Angeles night air at the end of the evening, I could still feel the slight stinging in my left breast where I had been hit hard by a stale bread roll a month ago. A complete stranger, the female guest of an unknown-to-me Lord, had launched it at me from across the room of the Chelsea Arts Club. She was insulted that she couldn’t crash our private dinner party. So I felt sympathy for Chris Rock when he bore the brunt of Will Smith’s rage. My assault, coming out of the blue, was a shock to my system, so I can only imagine the pain and embarrassment that Rock endured. But I must admit, it’s one heck of a way to make the Best Documentary category more interesting.

When Percy and I dine at the popular Craig’s restaurant in Hollywood, we, and many other well-known people, are often subjected to a barrage of flash bulbs. Usually the pictures are not good. Nevertheless, each shot, however awkward or uncomfortable we look, is allegedly the property of the independent paparazzo, who can then charge as much as they want for it. If the person in the photo (i.e. me) should post it on their social media or website, they can be threatened with a significant demand for payment. To me, this means that I do not own exclusive rights to my image. What next? Will expectant mothers not be able to post an ultrasound of their babies because the images belong to the technician?

When we attended an outdoor cocktail party for Sir Kenneth Branagh and his excellent film Belfast, Sir Kenneth was his usual ebullient yet modest self as he was being lionised by the guests. We reminisced about In the Bleak Midwinter, the movie he wrote and directed in which I played a tough Hollywood agent. In one scene, I had to walk down a hill chattering away to another actor while being followed by the camera. Being a stickler for authenticity of dialogue, Sir Kenneth insisted I retake this four-minute tracking shot several times.

‘But why?’ I would ask. ‘What didn’t you like?’

‘Darling, it was fine,’ said Ken, ‘but you kept on saying “the” instead of “a”.’

‘It’s not bloody Shakespeare,’ I muttered, trudging back up the hill.

In January, we returned to London. I thought I was safe from Covid after my booster, while Percy and I prepared for our 20th anniversary party at Claridge’s, which we had been planning for over two years. In the middle of the complication of creating perfect placement for 140 people, I started sneezing. It was Covid. Terrified I would have to cancel the event, I tested myself every day, and felt tremendous relief when I was finally negative with five days to spare. However, I asked my doctor to carry out a PCR test in the middle of my convalescence and this was reported to the NHS, so even though I was feeling better, the NHS kept calling me and telling me I couldn’t go out. I was in bureaucratic limbo.

The party was spectacular. The invitation stated that ‘white tie was optional’ but, lo and behold, at least half of the gentlemen complied. They all looked exceptionally handsome, as white tie is a most flattering look for men. The women also looked stunning wearing full-on evening gowns and finery. Many guests hadn’t been out of their homes properly for more than two years, so the celebrations, dancing and speeches were stellar. Altogether it was one of the best nights of my life, which I was so happy to celebrate with my husband of 20 years and so many close friends, some of whom had flown in from Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, New York, Hollywood and even, yes, deepest darkest Peru.

PRESS UPDATE : FORBES .. MARCH 29TH 2022 ..

 

Joan Collins Reflects On Her Life, New Documentary, And Being An Early Trailblazer For Fair Pay In Hollywood..

Jeff Conway

Senior Contri

Hollywood & Entertainment

I write about news emerging out of the evolving entertainment world.

For seven decades now, Dame Joan Collins has graced our screens, big and small, with her commanding presence of confidence, beauty, and wit. Arguably best known for bringing to life the iconic pop culture character of Alexis Carrington on the hit 1980s television series Dynasty, Collins is ready to tell her life story in the form of a new documentary on BritBox called This Is Joan Collins. But much like she has been throughout her entire Hollywood career, on and off camera, Collins continues to take matters into her own hands.

“Well, I’ve been asked to do them several times over the years and the format was always the same,” Collins, 88, tells me of the many documentary pitches she has received over the years. “Yes, we will get a bunch of your friends in, Joan, and they’ll all talk about you and say how fabulous you are - blah, blah, blah! And I said I don’t want to do that, and so I just waited until [producer] Karen [Steyn] came to me and said ‘Well, we have this idea that you would narrate the [documentary] yourself and we would take most of the text from your autobiographies that you’ve written.’ That’s what we did.”

In the documentary, Collins opens up in great detail about her early acting career as the golden age of Hollywood started to dwindle. She also speaks candidly about the ups-and-downs of her five marriages and her devotion as a mother throughout much of that turmoil. Collins goes on to tell me that she did not discuss the passing of her younger sister, popular novelist Jackie Collins, because she says the loss was too sad for her. What she does decide to share in This Is Joan Collins is her daughter Katy’s traumatic accident in the early 1980s, when she was hit by a car and had to undergo a long journey toward recovery.

When I asked Collins if she lives with any regrets in her life today, she says, “Well, of course I live with regrets. I mean, I regret that my daughter was knocked down by a car. I regret some my marriages - I did that too many times. I was stupid. Well, I don’t regret marrying Tony [Newley] because I have two wonderful children [Tara and Alexander] and marrying Ron [Kass], I had one beautiful daughter [Katy]. I sincerely regret marrying the Swede [Peter Holm].”

Collins is now married to Hollywood producer Percy Gibson and she informs me that they just had their 20th wedding anniversary, referring to Gibson as her partner for life forever.

While Collins was dealing with divorce off-screen, she certainly found her footing on-screen when she joined the fairly successful at the time new Dynasty series at the start of season two in 1981, playing the ex-wife of leading character Blake Carrington, played by actor John Forsythe.

With Collins now onboard as Alexis Carrington during a time when DVR playback and video streaming did not yet exist, Dynasty reached the number one spot on television during its 1984-85 season with a Nielsen rating of 25.0 and an impressive average of 21.2 million households tuning in each week to see what type of drama Alexis would stir up next.

Collins says of her beloved character, “The thing that I liked about Alexis was her wit. She was very witty, she was cutting, and she didn’t let anybody get anything over on her.”

A real-life moment when Collins tapped into her inner-Alexis was when she became aware during the height of Dynasty’s popularity that her male co-star Forsythe was being paid a considerable amount more than her. During a 2021 interview, Collins disclosed that she was making $15,000 an episode when she joined Dynasty, while Forsythe was taking in around $25,000 to $30,000 per episode. During a time in Hollywood when male-to-female pay contrasts were often known about but not often questioned, Collins made the bold choice to speak up for what she believed that she had earned.

“Well, everybody told me that I shouldn’t do it,” Collins recalls. “‘John has been around the business a lot longer than you.’ I thought Well, so what? And of course, he always had to be front and center of any ads. If you look at any of the ads from that time, even if you look at the DVDs that are out there, John Forsythe - Blake is always in the middle surrounding a bevy of women. And eventually I thought, here I am on the cover of every magazine in America, in Europe, in Asia. John Forsythe isn’t on the cover - why shouldn’t I get parity? And so, I went to [producer] Aaron [Spelling] and apparently, I did not know this but he had it in his contract that he always had to be paid more than any of the other people. So although they gave me a raise, they didn’t make it equal but I didn’t know that until after the show closed, but it didn’t matter, you know? I mean, I’m not greedy. Well, not really (laughs).”

Dynasty ran on television from 1981 until 1989. Collins remembers it being a great show, at least for the first three or four years. She says the writing fell apart shortly after that, because the ABC network wanted to kill the show, according to Collins. When Collins ironically teamed up with Linda Evans, the actress who often played Alexis’s feud-fueled scene partner on-screen as Krystle Carrington, to speak up together to producers about why they were being given “these awful scripts and these stupid storylines,” Collins says producers did not take notice of their concerns.

These days, Collins still gets a considerable amount of scripts sent her way and seems to have a much more laid-back approach toward contracts, knowing her value. When I asked Collins how she negotiates salary on projects today, she says, “Well, I just have my agent get on with it and just tell him what I want and what I think I deserve and he usually gets it or doesn’t.”

So, what is a day in the life like in 2022 for Joan Collins? “Well everything is different, you see, because we are right now in LA where we have an apartment but most of the time, we live in London where I also have an apartment and where my children and grandchildren live. So here, it’s really seeing friends, it’s reading scripts. It’s going swimming if one can. I don’t really have any hobbies. Can you count reading as a hobby? Photography? I’m very interested in fashion. I design a lot of my clothes. Last night, we played poker with friends.” In true Alexis Carrington fashion, when I asked Collins if she has a good poker face, she smiled at me with a steady stare saying, “Well, I usually win.”

I wrapped up my conversation with this life-long Hollywood legend and trailblazer in many respects, wondering what she would say to her former self, the Joan Collins who had just arrived in Hollywood as a teenager, looking to build a successful life for herself. Without hesitation, Collins confidently answers with, “You have a lot more power than you think you did.”

PRESS UPDATE : THE NEW YORK TIMES .. MARCH 29TH 2022 ..

 

Joan Collins Just Gets on With It

The actress (don’t call her an actor, please) reflects on her seven-decade career, predatory Hollywood and why sometimes it’s better not to relive the past.

By Alexis Soloski

Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — “I’m not a bad girl,” said Joan Collins, draped across a white sofa. “I was a very innocent girl. But I had dark hair and green eyes and I suppose they said that I smoldered.”

This was on a recent, sun-strafed California afternoon in her apartment, part of a luxury building on the edge of Beverly Hills. Collins, an actress whose career has ranged from the sublime (“Land of the Pharaohs”) to the ridiculous (“Empire of the Ants”) to the sublimely ridiculous (“Dynasty”), wore white slacks, an aquamarine blouse and white espadrilles. A pink diamond the size of a strawberry weighted one finger; her hair had been teased toward the heavens. How many synthetic zebras had died for those nearby pillows? That pouf? So many.

As for the smoldering, well, it was 85 degrees out. Wouldn’t anyone?

Collins, had invited me over — plying me with coffee, water, an assortment of deluxe cookies — to talk about “This Is Joan Collins,” a documentary that ran on the BBC on New Year’s Day and arrives Tuesday on BritBox.

What did it mean to look back on her life for the project? “I’m not very analytical,” she said languorously. “I just do a thing. I just get on with it.”

For the film, Collins gave the producers access to her archives and home movies. She otherwise discounts her contribution. “I said, ‘Just don’t put in too many of the nude bits,’” she said. But she narrates the film, with much of what she says adapted from her memoirs. “Here I am,” she purrs in the opening moments, “after seven decades in the business, to tell you a thing or two about how to survive the perils of the profession and what it really feels like to get what you want.”

Collins the eldest child of a dance teacher and a talent agent. As a child, she lived through the Blitz in London — the bombings, evacuations, dislocations — which has made her impatient with what she perceives as whining.

“I have to say, every time I read about an actor today, they’ve all been abused or had terrible childhoods,” she said. “I had a great childhood, other than the war.”

At 17, she signed with a British film studio. She doesn’t believe she was glamorous. Not then. But the press disagreed and she recalled some of the nicknames she was given: Britain’s bad girl, coffee bar vixen, the torrid baggage. She was typecast accordingly.

At first, it bothered her, she said, “then I shrugged and just got on with it.”

Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times

At 21, Fox made her a contract player and she came to California. She had already separated from her first husband, Maxwell Reed, an actor who had raped her on their first date. As she wrote in her first memoir, “Past Imperfect: An Autobiography,” and reiterates in the documentary, most of the men she encountered in the business were predatory.

She remembered being chased around a house in Palm Springs, a pass made in a car. Then she stopped remembering. “It’s all nasty memories that I don’t wish to relive,” she said. “It happened. It happened to girls all the time.”

How did she survive it? She shrugged and got on with it. “A lot of the time, I would just laugh in their faces,” she said.

In these early years, she developed a reputation for promiscuity, which wasn’t entirely deserved, even as it became part of her fame. (A 2015 auction of her belongings included not only love letters, but also her headboard.) “I did have a lot of boyfriends, but sequentially,” she said. “And I would sleep with some of them. Not at the same time. I think that I was ahead of my time, because women didn’t do that.”

At 30, she married the actor and songwriter Anthony Newley and had two children. When her relationship with Newley ended, she married the music executive Ron Kass and had a daughter. Later, there was a fourth marriage, to the Swedish singer Peter Holm. (“The only one I didn’t understand was the Swede,” she said. “That was such a total mistake.”) She now lives with her fifth husband, the theatrical producer Percy Gibson. He was the one who brought the water and took away the cookies.

She left the business after she married Newley and she struggled to return to it. The documentary includes clips of a particular low point, the real estate investors vs. mutant insects B movie “The Empire of the Ants” (1977). How did she handle schlocky material? “You do the best you can,” she said. “You learn your lines, you hit your marks and you get on with it.”

Only rarely could she escape typecasting, but she shrugged that off, too, recounting a conversation she had with the actor John Gielgud, in which he told her that because she could never escape her physicality, she could never play an ugly woman. “That was true for a certain amount of years,” she said.

She believes that good looks can be a deterrent when it comes to quality roles: “Which the young actresses of today realize, which is why most of them try to look as ordinary as possible.”

In the late 1970s, she made a comeback with two soft-core films — “The Stud” and “The Bitch” — adapted from novels by her sister Jackie Collins. This exposure led to her most famous role, Alexis in Aaron Spelling’s nighttime soap “Dynasty.”

Despite well-publicized on-set struggles, and the producers’ petty reaction to her demands for equal pay, she remains proud of “Dynasty.” Much of the memorabilia hung throughout her apartment dates from that era. “It was glamorous,” she said. “It was about very, very rich people, most of them good looking.” She compared it to the current hit “Succession,” though she remarked that on “Succession” they wear shabbier clothes.

“Dynasty” ended more than three decades ago. Collins hasn’t had a great role since. She thinks she knows why. “Casting directors say, ‘Oh, no, we can’t use Joan Collins in this vixen, bitch part, because it’s too obvious.’ And ‘Oh, no, we can’t have her in this other role. She can only do vixen bitches.’”

Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times

Still, she has gone on, describing her glamorous life in columns for the British weekly magazine The Spectator, where Boris Johnson was once her boss. “Jolly, very funny, great buffoon,” was how she described him, acknowledging that buffoon was perhaps the wrong word.

“He never cut a word of my diaries,” she added.

Collins hasn’t changed much. (Even her look has altered very little, though she claims to have tried Botox only once: “I screamed and left the surgery.”) And she’s not sure if the entertainment industry has either. “I’m not having men making passes at me, so I don’t know,” she said. “But I think probably.” Still, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, she seemed worried mostly about the men.

“Sadly, I think that now young men are suffering from being labeled toxically masculine,” she said, “because of this rise of anti-maleness.”

And yet, she identifies as a feminist. “I believe that women are equal to men in every single way,” she said. “Except physical strength. People say you didn’t burn your bra, you wear lipstick. So what? I’m very proud of being a woman.” She added that she hates being called an actor, preferring actress.

“What’s wrong with actress?” she said. “What’s wrong with mother? What’s wrong with woman? Girl? I don’t like having that word taken away.” (Had anyone tried?)

This was about an hour into the conversation, just before I was ushered out of the apartment just as warmly as I had been welcomed in — a photographer had arrived, Collins had smoldering to do. But first I had to ask her about that opening line of the documentary: What does it really feel like to get what you want?

She wakes up every morning and thanks “God or whoever it is,” she said. “I mean, I’m very lucky.”

Then she added, with something that may have been a wink, “But you make your own luck sometimes, right?”

EVENT UPDATE : VANITY FAIR OSCAR PARTY.. THE WALLIS ANNEBERG CENTRE .. BEVERLY HILLS .. CALIFORNIA.. MARCH 27TH 2022 ..

Photo (c) Kevin Mazur    Joan with Kathy Hilton

Joan looking sensational in silver attended the annual Vanity Fair Party, one of her favourite events, held at The Wallis Anneberg Centre in Beverly Hills. Joan caught up with many friends including the wonderful Kathy Hilton..

 

EVENT UPDATE : CHARLES FINCH & CHANEL PRE OSCAR DINNER.. THE POLO LOUNGE .. THE BEVERLY HILLS HOTEL.. LOS ANGELES .. MARCH 26TH 2022 ..

(c) Jon Kopaloff

As a prelude to the Oscars, Charles Finch in assiciation with Chanel hosted a pre-oscar dinner at The Polo Lounge at The Beverly Hills Hotel.. Joan looking sensational in sequins attended the event..

(C) Hunter Abrams / New York Times   Joan greeted by Charles Finch

EVENT ALERT! : MY UNAPOLOGETIC DIARIES BOOK EVENT.. BOOK SOUP.. LOS ANGELES.. APRIL 12TH 2022 ..

 

To promote the newly released USA edition of her bestselling book 'My Unapologetic Diaries', Joan will appear at an exclusive event at Los Angeles legendary store Book Soup to sign copies of her sensational book. You can buy limited tickets at the following link..

Please note the new revised date...

MY UNAPOLOGETIC DIARIES BOOK EVENT.. BOOK SOUP LA.. ORDER TICKETS HERE!

DVD ALERT : THIS IS JOAN COLLINS .. ORDER NOW FROM HMV!

 You can order the new dvd release of 'This Is Joan Collins' from HMV at the following link.. 

THIS IS JOAN COLLINS - ORDER HERE...

PROMO UPDATE : TOMORROW MORNING.. COMING FROM VISUALIZE FILMS.. SUMMER 2022 ..

 Joan's latest film is the upcoming British musical drama 'Tomorrow Morning', which is set to be released this Summer.. Here is a look at the brand new poster for the film, featuring a wonderful shot of Joan... For release date watch this space!!

PRESS UPDATE : WOMAN'S WORLD .. ISSUE MARCH 28TH 2022 .. OUT NOW!

 For those in the USA, check out the latest issue of Woman's World magazine featuring Joan on the cover with a feature inside. Out Now!

PRE-ORDER ALERT : MY UNAPOLOGETIC DIARIES SPECIAL LIMITED EDITION.. ORDER NOW! .. RENAISSANCE LITERARY ..

 

You can now Pre-order the special signed USA limited edition of Joan's UK best seller 'My Unapologetic Diaries' at the following links from Renaissance Literary. Copies will be shipped in June and all will be signed by Joan!

MY UNAPOLOGETIC DIARIES INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING LINK!

MY UNAPOLOGETIC DIARIES LIMITED EDITION USA SHIPPING LINK!