Joan is featured on the cover of the Sept edition of UK Saga magazine with a new interview and photos from her summer in the South of France.. The issue is available from Tuesday August 23rd..
You can read some of the interview below!
“I think what is important is not age, but how you look, feel and behave and I believe it to be “tremendously rude” to ask a woman her age – or even discuss it.
“My mother’s generation never did it,” she adds. “But you know, people have been calling me an older woman since I was 38!”
“I think maybe at last producers and directors have realised that, if they are going to be showing real life in the movies, then they are going to have to look at people who are older.”
“Look at Helen Mirren and Judi Dench – they are far more popular than me.”
She says: “People say why don’t you put your feet up? I do put my feet up – and I don’t do anything I don’t enjoy.”
“My children mean so much to me, but it was very hard. People enjoy this fantasy that I am a super-bitch because of Alexis, but 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.”
Long before the #MeToo era, Dame Joan says she was subjected to unwanted advances from several studio bigwigs, including one producer she was horrified to find lying naked in the bath after he summoned her to his New York hotel room to discuss a film part.
“He invited me to jump in and I turned on my heels and got out of the building as fast as I could,” she says.
Although she hated her developing curves as a teenager and considered herself a tomboy – a notion that changed, she says, “when boys discovered me” – her striking beauty as a young starlet caught the eye of many A-list icons.
In her autobiography she reveals that she turned down Dean Martin, Richard Burton, US Senator Bobby Kennedy and Ol’ Blue Eyes himself Frank Sinatra, who invited her to fly with him to Hamburg for a dinner date – which she rejected because of his notoriety for “one-night stands.”
She did, however, fall for Warren Beatty after they met at an LA party in 1959. They became engaged the following year when she fell pregnant but she felt it too early to start a family.
They eventually split after an 18-month romance because she found him too manipulative – “He made me turn down several movies” – and demanding in bed. “His need for sex several times a day wore me out,” she says.
Dame Joan now describes fifth hubby Percy as “the love of my life”.
“It’s a great marriage, a great relationship,” she says. Of course, we have our little spats like other couples might do, but we’ve both got our safe spaces. He has his office at home. I have my walk-in closet. And separate bathrooms. We’re really lucky – I realise most people don’t have two bathrooms.”
She also tearfully discusses the death of her author sister Jackie in 2015 aged 77. Just months before she died, Joan was made a Dame and was thrilled this June to take part in the Jubilee Pageant to celebrate The Queen’s 70 years on the throne.
“She’s a wonderful woman,” Dame Joan declares. “She’s inspirational, she’s terribly easy to talk to and terribly interested. It’s the sort of conversation you could have with your next door neighbour.”
Fans will soon be able to see Dame Joan playing Her Majesty’s somewhat less popular late aunt-in-law Wallis Simpson, whose love for King Edward VIII sparked a royal scandal and led to his abdication.
She is to star in In Bed with the Duchess, a film written by her friend Louise Fennell. She says: “I play the Duchess of Windsor from the time that the Duke died right up until her death. It’s a fabulous story.”
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