EVENT UPDATE : BELGRAVIA JUBILEE GARDEN PARTY.. CHESHAM PLACE GARDENS ... LONDON .. SATURDAY MAY 28TH 2022 ..

 

Joan with Liz Brewer

To celebrate the Queen's Platinum Jubilee, The Hari Hotel's Andrew Coney and Belgravia magazine editor Jonathan Whiley and publisher Adrian Day & wife Selma Habib hosted a Jubilee Garden Party in Chesham Place. Joan & Percy attended the event along with brother Bill and wife Hazel, also society queen Liz Brewer.. A selection of vintage cars from The 96 Club were also on view, Joan's brother Bill is a keen enthusiast.. 

Bill & Hazel Collins

PRESS UPDATE : THE TIMES .. SATURDAY MAY 28TH 2022 ..

DAME JOAN COLLINS: 'I Would Have Been Very Good As Margaret In 'The Crown'!

By Michael Odell Saturday May 28 2022, The Times

The night before I meet her, Dame Joan Collins was up late playing poker. “Of course I won,” she wafts imperiously. “But the food we ate was rather too spicy.”

As a result her tum is not feeling quite right this morning so she wants to order her lunch off-menu: two poached eggs and some plain rice. However, we are in Claridge’s, Mayfair. I see caviar, oysters and a £90 steak but nothing so simple as eggs. Our waitress says she will “check” with the chef.

Big mistake. You don’t “check” with Joan Collins.

“I want my special dietary lunch,” she insists.

Our waitress scuttles off.

I have been cordially invited to take the film legend to lunch so that we can discuss her role in next week’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations.

With the model Twiggy and the choreographer Arlene Phillips, Collins will ride through London in a vintage open-top Jaguar, waving to the crowds as part of a tribute called Dames in Jags.

“Hags in Jags, more like,” she scoffs. “Sorry, ladies, but really that’s what it is.”

I am laughing so hard I don’t register a subtle change in mood. With Collins it’s a mistake ever to believe you’ve been fully admitted to the tent.

“Are you a monarchist?” she asks me suddenly.

I’m still mumbling a jumbled, hedged answer when she interrupts me.

“You ought to be. The Queen is an incredible woman. I’m quite old-fashioned in that way. We’ve become far too bashful about waving the flag. Rule, Britannia!”

Joan flies the flag with Jane Seymour, Juliet Mills & Samantha Eggar

Collins feels she has grown up with the 96-year-old monarch. When she and her sister Jackie (the novelist who died of breast cancer in 2015) were evacuated from London to Bognor Regis during the Second World War, they were given miniature cardboard cutouts of the then young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, to play with.

“I cut out paper clothes and stuck them on,” she recalls. “ Then I chatted to them about their lives and hopes and dreams. Of course I didn’t know them but they were confidantes — they were like friends.”

Postwar Collins became a Hollywood star, signing to 20th Century Fox aged 21, and in her subsequent 70-year career she has met the Queen six or seven times.

“She’s a really great conversationalist who knows a lot about the theatre,” she says before turning a bit frosty. “Of course that’s when she’s actually allowed to speak to anyone for more than two seconds.”

Joan at Royal Albert Hall with The Queen & Prince Philip & daughter Katy Kass

If there were any natural justice, Collins’s life-long emotional connection to Her Majesty would have been made complete when Netflix created The Crown — her louche ease in fur would surely have made her a memorable Princess Margaret.

“Oh, I would have been very good,” she agrees. “I would have brought so much to her.”

Collins even lobbied for the role but lost out to Vanessa Kirby, Helena Bonham Carter and Lesley Manville, who played the princess at various ages.

“I’m not going to knock my fellow actors but, to my mind, the whole thing was miscast. They made some appalling mistakes. I loved Claire Foy [who played the Queen], but I couldn’t watch the rest.”

Collins has very decided ideas about what makes a good royal, on screen and off. Some of the real-life incumbents are miscast too, she says. She loves the Cambridges. I wonder how she’d feel if she bumped into the Sussexes next week.

“You will never hear those two names pass my lips,” she says, vigorously slashing at her bread with a butter knife.

Why ever not?

“Because I would be cancelled. Everyone wants to know what I think of them but I say nothing. I’m not a liar. I cannot be false. One of the things I can’t bear about Hollywood is when people say, ‘Darling, you look gorgeous!’ to the most ill-dressed people imaginable. I have to speak as I find.”

Last year Collins proved this was very much the case when she published My Unapologetic Diaries. The actress Faye Dunaway’s “ass” looked as if it had been shaped with a “bacon slicer”. Frank Sinatra was a bore. The actors Richard Burton and Richard Todd, even the US senator Robert F Kennedy, all unsuccessfully tried it on with her. Her one-time fiancé the actor Warren Beatty’s need for sex several times a day “wore me out”.

And that was even before we get to her actual marriages. Her first husband, the actor Maxwell Reed, drugged and raped her before they were married (they wed a year afterwards because she felt an “obligation”).

“For our generation sex was shrouded in secrecy and horror,” Collins says. “So when I first had sex I thought, ‘Is this love? I suppose it must be.’ The first time I ever saw a naked man was the night I was raped.”

Her third husband, Ron Kass, manager of the Beatles, was reportedly a drug addict. Her fourth, Peter Holm, was a womanising bully.

Such a succession of disasters would have finished many people.

“That’s true, I think. But I have resilience, as did my sister Jackie, probably because we grew up during the war. Being woken up at night and led down into the cellar or down the street to a Tube station [used as an air raid shelter] and the next day finding your home and all your toys destroyed . . . You learnt to accept terrible things happening and moved on.”

That resilience has made her tough but means she is endlessly mistaken for the women she plays — especially scheming Alexis Colby in 1980s soap Dynasty.

“People enjoy this fantasy that I am a ‘superbitch’, as the Daily Express once put it. I think it’s utterly ridiculous that powerful, resilient women are portrayed as dangerous, whereas in my experience it’s the predatory men who are the real threat.”

These days, she says, pornography has made the problem worse.

“I find porn sickening — it’s destroying relationships. Young men these days are watching it from the age of nine and they grow up with ridiculous expectations of women’s bodies. No woman can hope to live up to their fantasies. When I was a child at boarding school all we had was Forever Amber [the 1944 historical novel by Kathleen Winsor], in which the hero holds a girl in his arms and finds her soft lips. It was gentle, you could imagine . . .”

The thing with Collins is she is never dogmatic. No sooner has she made her point than her critical gaze swings the other way.

“I think modern women can be too militant, though — it’s very difficult for men. They even have to ask a woman permission for a kiss. It must be terrifying! Do you seek permission to kiss your wife?”

Er no, not every time. I sense the vibe.

“You do what?!”

I trust my instincts.

“I’m glad to hear it.”

These days Collins is blissfully happy. She found love 20 years ago after meeting the theatre producer Percy Gibson in America. He’s 32 years her junior. She calls him “Big Dog”.

The trick to a successful marriage, she says, is to talk, laugh and have separate bathrooms. Crucially, she advises young women to see beyond sex.

“I think that is a mistake I made in earlier marriages. I didn’t explore who the real person was.”

Collins has homes in central London, Los Angeles and in the south of France. She loves eating out, then going home to play Scrabble or poker. Three times a week she does a Zoom workout with her personal trainer.

“I put on weight during that wretched pandemic but I’ve got rid of it,” she says, smiling. She looks lovely in her green jacket and silk shirt. It looks like Chanel.

“It’s Zara,” she says, delighted. “Designer clothes are far too expensive these days.”

Joan with Princess Margaret and Warren Beatty at a Royal Premiere

The real secret to a woman’s happiness, she says, is to keep working. She certainly enjoys remembering her amazing career — there she is on Insta hanging out with the Queen, Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minnelli, Andy Warhol — but she is happiest getting her teeth into something, or someone, new. This summer she will be writing her second volume of diaries. And she is also attached to a film about the last days of the Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, the American wife of Edward VIII who abdicated in 1936.

“She enjoyed great parties in gay nightclubs, so not too much of a stretch,” she twinkles, looking at herself in a little heart-shaped mirror stuck to the back of her iPhone. “But I’m not Tom Cruise. No one says, ‘Here’s £25 billion, off you go and make your film.’ I have to fight for things.”

Our time is up and Collins makes a discreet phone call. It sounds as if she’s having a car brought round to the front. But actually no, it’s her husband she’s having brought round. Percy, who has been tucked away around the corner eating a ham and cheese sandwich, duly arrives to escort her away.

She’s off to a fitting for the jubilee celebrations. She’ll wear a dress she designed herself and a Philip Treacy hat. She’s in two minds about wearing her damehood medal, though.

“I’ll ring Twiggy for advice, otherwise [society interior designer] Nicky Haslam will say, ‘Oh, she’s worn that great big medal, absolutely shocking, how could she?’ ”

We return to the subject of the Queen. Will she step back from her duties permanently after the jubilee?

“I think it would be terribly sad but better than the Queen dying. Death is inevitable but that would be a tragedy.”

If Prince Charles assumed the role of monarch, would he be known as prince regent or consort, she asks me. I don’t know.

“Well, you should know!”

Again, just as you are getting comfortable it’s like being Tasered.

Her advice is that we all enjoy the jubilee, whether it be the “Hags in Jags”, the evening pop concert, the charismatic Cambridges or “the other two”.

“I say enjoy it because I very much doubt there’ll ever be another Platinum Jubilee. Let’s be frank — we won’t see an extraordinary woman like the Queen again.”

Takes one to know one and amen to that.

Joan with The Queen & Kate O'Mara & Shirley Bassey

Joan Collins’s perfect weekend

Shoulder pads or hoodie?
Oh please — really?

The Stud or The Bitch?
The Stud — rather a good film, you know

Five-star hotel or Airbnb?
Five-star hotel

Smoothie or fry-up?
Fry-up on weekends

Cinema or theatre?
Cinema

What’s your screensaver?
My granddaughter Ava

Signature dish?
Spaghetti bolognese

I couldn’t get through my weekend without . . .
Watching a good film

I couldn’t get through the jubilee weekend without . . .
Decent weather. It’s an open-topped car and if it rains we’re all going to look frightful

Dame Joan Collins will be taking part in the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Pageant on Sunday, June 5. The pageant will process along the Mall and surrounding streets in celebration of the Queen’s 70-year reign; platinumpageant.com

PRESS UPDATE : HELLO! MAGAZINE.. MAY 25TH 2022

 

Dame Joan Collins brings all the glamour to HELLO!'s star-studded Jubilee party

The iconic actress was joined by a host of famous faces..

By Hannah Fillingham

US Managing Editor

Dame Joan Collins turned heads last night as she graced the iconic Langan's Brasserie for a red, white and blue themed Jubilee party.

The iconic actress looked glamorous dressed in a statement white dress accessorised with a feather boa and white heels.

She hosted many of her famous friends upstairs in Langan's lounge, including Spice Girl star Mel C, Denise van Outen, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Christopher Biggins.

Andrea McLean, Esther ranZen, Dame Arlene Philips, Julia Bradbury and Georgia Toffolo were also in attendance.

Throughout the night, DJ Fat Tony provided the music, having recently flown back from Miami following Brooklyn Beckham's star-studded wedding.

Guests sipped a wide range of drinks, including Landon, Dubonnet cocktails, Plymouth gin and Clean and Co non-alcoholic gin, while tucking into British-themed canapés..

Joan with Denise Van Outen

Chatting to HELLO! on the night, Mel C said: "It's so lovely to be here tonight. The Queen is the ultimate in girl power. 70 years! She’s an inspiration. I wish you a very happy birthday ma'am!"

Denise Van Outen told HELLO!:  "I am such a royalist, I always have been. My house is full of pictures of the Queen. I am so excited to celebrate the Jubilee on the bank holiday weekend with a garden party with family and friends."

Dame Arlene Philips added: "I'm going to be one of the Dames in the final act of the People's Pageant on 5 June. I feel so lucky to be appearing alongside national treasures. Her Majesty presented me with my OBE [in 2001] and an CBE [in 2013] and it was magical to be in her presence. One of the things that struck me about the Queen is her resilience. She works tirelessly and always has a smile and puts people at ease."

Ben Moseley, the artist of the Queen portrait displayed at the event, said: "I'm so proud to be in this room helping celebrate our greatest Monarch."

Joan gave a speech alongside HELLO!'s editor-in-chief, Rosie Nixon, who showcased artist Ben Mosley's Jubilee painting of the Queen, featuring gold leaf.

Joking that she had been "eating and drinking" a lot at the party, which had caused her to "burst her dress," Joan told the guests: "My darling husband went out to find me another dress, so that's what the fun is all about."

Honouring the Queen, she added; "We're all here because we love this woman, she is wonderful and we have all loved her all our lives, I certainly have. She's been a huge part of my life, as have all the family, and I think that we have so much to be thankful for to have such a wonderful woman on the throne and long may she reign."

"Thank you all for coming. I would like to raise a glass to Queen Elizabeth our queen. God save the queen."

EVENT UPDATE : HELLO! PLATINUM JUBILEE PARTY .. LANGAN'S .. LONDON .. MAY 24TH 2022 ..

 

Joan was star guest at Hello! Magazines Platinum Jubilee party at Langan's in London earlier, looking super glamorous.. Others attending were Christopher Biggins, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Arlene Philipps and Esther Rantzen.. 

EVENT UPDATE : THE CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW VIP PREVIEW DAY .. RHS LONDON .. MAY 23RD 2022 ..

 

Joan with Brewin Dolphin Garden Designer Paul Hervey Brookes

The highlight of the London calendar is the RHS Chelsea Flower Show and traditionally the Monday is a VIP preview day which attracts various celebrities and the Royal family.. Joan started her birthday celebrations with a visit to the show and took time to check out the Brewin Dolphin Garden designed by Paul Hervey Brookes who is also a supporter of Joan's favourite charity Shooting Star Childrens Charity. When the show finishes portions of the garden will be sold off to raise funds for the charity and Paul will design a garden for the charities Hospice, Christopher's in Guildford..

Joan with Amabassador Rob Bugden, Veteran Sydney McFarlane & Designer John Everiss

Joan also took time to visit the RAF Benevolent Fund Garden and met RAF Ambassador Rob Bugden, veteran Sydney McFarlane and gardens designer John Everiss..  The show officially opens Tuesday May 24th till Sat 28th...

Ambassador Rob & Veteran Sydney

BOOK ALERT : MY UNAPOLOGETIC DIARIES PAPERBACK .. JUNE 23RD 2022 ..

 

Just a reminder that the paperback edition of Joan's best selling book 'My Unapologetic Diaries' will be published on June 23rd.. You can pre-order a copy at the following link..

MY UNAPOLOGETIC DIARIES PAPERBACK PRE-ORDER HERE!

EVENT UPDATE : THE LAUNCH OF MOSCHINO BY ASSOULINE ... MAISON ASSOULINE.. PICADILLY LONDON .. MAY 11TH 2022 ..

 

Joan with Jeremy Scott

To launch the new coffe table book 'Moschino by Assouline', Jeremy Scott creative director of Moschino was thrilled to welcome Joan to the book launch at historic flagship book company store Maison Assouline in Picadilly. Joan is featured in the book in an iconic shot for W magazine in 2018... 

Moschino Book Cover

When Jeremy Scott inherited Franco Moschino’s eponymous fashion house in 2013, he did more than just give it a face lift. As fashion’s resident enfant terrible, known for pushing the label with his daring collections laced with pop culture references and rebellious humor, Scott was a natural fit to revive the 30-year-old Italian label, which made its name on rule-breaking outfits. In the years since he became Moschino’s creative director, Scott has sent some of fashion’s most playful collections down the runway, drawing inspiration from everything including Barbie, car washes, Looney Toons, and Picasso to create the ‘cheap and chic’ sensibility they’re known for.

Designed in close collaboration with Scott himself, this volume brings to life the world of Moschino as seen through the designer’s eyes. Featuring a treasure trove of images from campaigns, editorials, fashion shows, backstage photos, front rows, red carpets, parties, and more, it’s all things Moschino, as only Jeremy Scott could do it.

Photo (c) Dashti Jahfar        Joan with Jeremy Scott & Tom Daley

Moschino’s like sleeping beauty, and I just gave it the kiss.

Jeremy Scott

At the launch for the book in London, Scott reflected on his revival of the Italian brand, founded in 1983. 'How would I describe Jeremy Scott's Moschino? Fun, glamorous and avant-garde.' For the book, he selected images for 185 pages filled with glorious Moshino-isms. These include countless red carpet moments, and Scott cites an image of himself and pop princess Gwen Stefani on their way to the Met Gala in 2019 as one of the most memorable, and editorial shoots by the likes of Nick Knight. Then there's the ever-provocative campaigns by the brand, such as the soap drama-esque A/W 19 shot by Steven Meisel starring Gigi Hadid and Joan Smalls in the midst of a cat fight, which also doubles up as the book's cover. Proposing a visual history of the brand with the designer also providing screen grabs from his phone, this is Moschino through Jeremy Scott's eyes.

All hail Mosc