PHOTO FLASHBACK : LADIES OF VARIETY TRIBUTE LUNCHEON ... MILLENNIUM BRITTANIA HOTEL ... LONDON... JUNE 7TH 2000 ..

 

Joan has had a long association with Variety, here is some shots from a tribute lunch hosted by Ladies of Variety honouring Joan in June 2000 attended by her many friends including Christopher Biggins and Tony Hatch both featured in the photos, also a look at cover of event program..

PRESS UPDATE : THE SPECTATOR .. JANUARY 27TH 2023 ..

Joan presented at The 1984 Oscars  

 

Joan Collins

My verdict on the Oscars line-up

• From magazine issue:28 January 2023

Last Sunday in LA, we went to the cinema, where I’ve hardly been since Covid. I wasn’t expecting much from the film, as truly enjoyable and entertaining films have been thin on the ground recently. Regardless, I’ve always loved the whole experience of cinema-going, from handing over the tickets and finding your seat to the anticipation of watching the forthcoming attractions. But the trailers shown this time were mostly science-fiction – futuristic, computer-generated pot-boilers – and even though none of them probably cost less than £50 million, the previews left me cold… and deaf. I had to stuff tissue in my ears to muffle the booms and bangs. Ah, for those halcyon days when I was a child, watching exciting trailers for next week’s picture starring Gene Kelly (dancing beautifully) or Danny Kaye (singing hysterically) or a constellation of stars more jam-packed than heaven. Hollywood manufactured dreams then.

As for today’s Oscar-nominated films, they are generally bleak, confusing and interminable. Although there is much trumpeting about how inspiring and brilliant these films are by critics and trade papers such as Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, the consensus from conversations with people I know and respect is that they are unwatchable. They cut back and forth between scenes, overuse flashbacks (eight weeks back, two weeks forward, three years back…) and light them so poorly that all you can see is a dark screen as you strain to hear the dialogue over the soundtrack.

Joan with Paul Newman & Joanne Woodward at 30th Oscars.

The public seem to be fighting back by simply not going to the movies nearly as much – attendance is way down. Take Babylon, the much-heralded drama about decadent 1920s Hollywood (nominated for three Academy Awards), which has taken a measly $15 million after costing $160 million to make. Another Oscar contender is Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. When we tried to watch it at home, we had to turn on the subtitles as the accented English was so difficult to understand, but since the dialogue switched between Mandarin and English, the English subtitles during the Mandarin exchanges were hidden by a large banner announcing that the actors were ‘SPEAKING MANDARIN’.

Another massively hyped contender for Best Picture is James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water. It’s a super-expensive sequel to the first one, which took in $3 billion globally. Can the new one beat it? As of now it’s still climbing, but personally I have no interest in which way water goes.

My bet for this year’s best movie (and best actor) is Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, which has been both a critical and commercial success. It’s highly entertaining, if a bit frenetic. And as for the movie I went to the cinema to watch? It turned out to be great. A terrific action thriller called Plane that kept us in our seats with excellent performances and a wonderful, barely believable narrative. There were no flashbacks, scenes were resolved before they cut, and violence was kept to a minimum, thus used for maximum effect. It’s not an Oscar contender by any stretch of the imagination, mostly because it was watchable, satisfying and brief.

Joan performing at 31st Oscars with Dana Wynter & Angela Lansbury

We have been in LA since just before Christmas and the weather has been unusually freezing and rainy most of the time, so that sweaters and woolly socks need to be worn in bed. That makes it doubly tragic to see the amount of homelessness in what used to be called the ‘Golden State’. There are rows upon rows of tented shelters in downtown LA and near the beaches – they resemble shanty towns. It’s heartbreaking that a state as rich as California seems unable to cope.

Recently, I was sitting in a nail bar in Beverly Hills when a homeless man came in and made a beeline for me.

‘Hello, Halle,’ he said. ‘Will you treat me to a pedicure?’ Every nail worker in the room suddenly stopped chatting to their clients and bent their heads in intense concentration.

‘Erm, Halle?’ I asked. ‘I’m not Halle.’

‘Yes, you are! You’re Halle Berry – we’re good friends, remember?’ he insisted. I looked to my manicurist for help, but none was forthcoming. I’ve never seen anyone so focused on my cuticles. The man was getting more and more frustrated as I insisted that I wasn’t Halle Berry, however flattered I was that he would think so. He started to get angry, and I started to get frightened, whereupon, like the prince who rides in on a white stallion, Percy appeared, having finally secured a parking spot. The manager of the shop was persuaded to give the man a pedicure and all was well that ended well.

PRESS UPDATE : XTRA* MAGAZINE .. JANUARY 24TH 2023 ...

 

Men in dresses? Dame Joan Collins may have finally learned to hold her tongue

In her latest memoir, actress, author and gay icon Joan Collins shares her thoughts on fashion and the legacy of “Dynasty” ..

By Matthew Hays

In April 1981, the first season of the ABC prime-time soap opera Dynasty ended with a cliffhanger so juicy and over the top that it helped propel the show from number 28 in the ratings into the top 20 for its next season. Multimillionaire oil magnate Blake Carrington (John Forsythe) was on trial for the murder of the former lover of his gay son Steven (Al Corley)—thinking the two men were kissing, Blake roughly and fatally pushed them apart. A mystery witness was called to testify at the trial. Who was this new character, an apparently glamorous woman whose face was obscured by a giant hat? 

Gay characters, and especially plots about homophobia, were rare on 1980s network TV, so the show had already drawn a queer fan base. But when the second season began in November 1981, finally revealing that the mystery woman, Blake’s ex-wife Alexis Carrington, was played by British actress Joan Collins, a queer icon was born.

Collins sunk her teeth into the role with obvious relish: Alexis was a cold, manipulative, take-no-prisoners woman, tough as nails, recalling the scheming women of the melodramas of yesteryear. Gay men loved her, drag queens dressed up as her and she appeared on the cover of magazines everywhere, from Newsweek to Cosmopolitan to Vanity Fair, even posing nude for Playboy magazine. She was 50 at the time and Collins declared that appearing in dishabille in the famous magazine was her way of proving women over 40 could still have sex appeal.

Collins’s acting career began in the 1950s. She knew from a young age that she wanted to act, both on stage and screen, and as a teenager, she studied at the legendary Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London. (The desire for fame seemed to run in the family—her younger sister Jackie grew up to be a bestselling writer of outrageously oversexed novels.) While appearing in a range of films, from period pieces like Esther and the King (1960) to low-budget horror like Empire of the Ants (1977) to sexploitation films based on her sister Jackie’s blockbuster books (1978’s The Stud and 1979’s The Bitch), Collins would also guest star on numerous TV shows, including what many consider the greatest episode of the original Star Trek series, 1967’s “City on the Edge of Forever,” in which she had a tryst with Captain Kirk (William Shatner). She also played The Siren, a villain on the 1960s television campfest iteration of Batman.

If her career choices, which reached their apex with her eight-season turn as Alexis on Dynasty, seemed over the top, they reflected Collins’s own personal life. She has been married five times, acknowledging over the years that landing a reliable romantic partner was a challenge. Her first marriage fell apart after her husband, Maxwell Reed, tried to sell her for a night to an Arab sheik. She had multiple affairs, most notably with Charlie Chaplin’s son Sydney Chaplin, as well as Ryan O’Neal and Warren Beatty (who apparently asked for her hand in marriage while simultaneously insisting she get an abortion). She married Percy Gibson in 2002 and has three children from previous marriages.

If not quite competing with her sister, Collins has written numerous books, including memoirs, fiction and collections of beauty tips. Her career as an author became something of a soap opera itself when, in the 1990s, Random House sued her for $1.2 million after she submitted manuscripts for two novels, for which she had been paid an advance of $4 million. The publisher claimed that her submissions were unpublishable. Collins emerged victorious from the ensuing court battle, with Random House forced to pony up $1 million.

Collins was also made a dame by the recently late Queen Elizabeth II for her extensive charity work in the United Kingdom.

Collins’s latest book, My Unapologetic Diaries, is a titillating and whimsical documentation of the years 1989 (just as Dynasty was winding down) to 2009. Collins offers up her frank opinions on fashion, celebrity and how the tabloids, which were the main feeders of celebrity scandal before social media, were obsessed with her. She doesn’t hold back on describing the dark side of showbiz: she jokes how, after she is shocked to see a roach at an upscale restaurant she’s eating at, she ponders hiring the insect as her next agent.

Collins spoke with Xtra from her Los Angeles home.

Reading your diaries, I got a real sense of how incredibly social you are. You’re always going out on the town, going to restaurants and parties. This must be part of the reason you bond so well with gay men.

What else do you do when you’re not working? I mean, I’m not a painter. I do fabulous flower arrangements. In fact, I just posted photos of one on Instagram. It was the arrangement I did for Christmas. I’m not one to sit around twiddling my thumbs, if you know what I mean. I love the theatricality of restaurants, and I have a lot of friends. We have quite a few times when we have people over here. I like it. I never analyzed it in terms of my gay friends. I’ve had gay friends forever. My mother had gay friends. My mother had two dressmakers who were gay. They were hilariously funny. This was when I was 13 or 14, and they made dresses for me, too. I designed dresses for my aunt. I still design a lot of my own stuff. 

The beginning of the book is a bit agonizing because you were trailblazing in terms of getting equal pay for starring in Dynasty, but then you didn’t ultimately get more money because they cut your episodes in half.

Isn’t that astonishing? Isn’t that just the pits? I just could not believe it. First of all, ABC had decided they hated the show. It was a huge moneymaker for them for eight or nine years, and while the ratings were falling a bit, it was still a hit. New people came in at ABC and they hated the show. They wanted to destroy it. They started taking people off and putting them in the spin-off The Colbys. They took many of our best actors who went over to The Colbys for an episode or two. It felt so disloyal. We had this great show and they were ruining it because the public became confused. Then they put The Colbys in our time slot. But you know, you can’t be cock of the hoop all the time—that’s an English expression.

I understand they also stiffed you on the residuals for the reruns.

I’m sure many think I’m making loads of money from Dynasty, but we all had to give up on any residuals, because they said that this show will never make any money, because serials don’t work in reruns. It became one of the biggest serials of all time in reruns. Whenever I bump into old cast mates, we all go on about it. They made us sign away our rights, which I didn’t want to do. The lawyer came into my dressing room and he said—does it sound like I’m whingeing? Because I don’t want to sound like Prince Harry, you know.

No, no, no …

… because I’m giving you the actual facts. The lawyer said, “You have to sign this, you have to give away all your rights.” I said, “I don’t want to do this.” And he said, “You’re the last one we’ve asked.” He said they’d all signed, so I said I don’t really have any choice, do I? They gave us three episodes of money. Nothing else.

Amazing they could get away with that. You kvetch a bit about the British tabloids, which is understandable….

Oh no, I don’t kvetch about the tabloids. I’m not Prince Harry. I just did say that it was certain people who would put out horrible, untrue stories about me. “Joan slips on her way into a restaurant and everyone cheers!” Absolute lies. I wasn’t happy about those, because they wanted to paint me in real life as the Alexis villain bitch. It comes with the territory. I’m not a person who sits around with her mouth shut. I will point out when I think it’s unfair, when you’re painting me into a corner, and that’s unfair. There was a time when they were trying to portray Linda [Evans, who played Krystle Carrington on Dynasty] as Saint Linda. Because the public loves that.

One of the revelations for me was that Aaron Spelling [the producer of Dynasty, as well as, later on, Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place] was not such a loyal person.

Well, he was very loyal at the beginning. He fought for me to be Alexis. ABC did not want me. They wanted Elizabeth [Taylor], they wanted Sophia [Loren], they wanted Jessica Walters. They were all arguing and holding out for money. They finished the first season with a woman walking into the courtroom with a big hat. So he was loyal in the beginning and a good friend. But you know, he was also a producer. [Laughs.]

Show business has changed. You’ve been so remarkably resilient. What advice do you have for young people today who aspire to be actors?

Don’t. [Laughs.] It’s a very tough profession. My father was an agent, and when I wanted to be an actress, he said, “You have to understand that nobody’s going to do anything for you, you’re going to face tons and tons of rejection. And if you have a career, it may last only three or four years, and you have to be tough. You mustn’t let it get you down.” So that’s what I would say. But I’ve been lucky because I’ve had a career that’s lasted for decades. 

Our culture has become a lot more open in the past few decades, especially for queer people. But a lot of people argue we are still very hung up on sex. Do you think we’re better off today or worse?

I think it’s become cheapened, hasn’t it? When I was very young, it wasn’t talked about. I don’t know about how the rest of the world works, but here, I think it’s been cheapened. I don’t watch porn. I hear it’s disgusting. I have no interest in it

Let’s talk fashion: Brad Pitt, Daniel Craig and Harry Styles have all posed for photo sessions in dresses. Do you think a man can be sexy in a dress?

Ha! Oh my god! That is a leading question. I can just see the headlines in the British press now: “Men Can’t Be Sexy in a Dress, Says Joan.” I’m not answering that question. All I can say is, whatever floats your boat, if they want to do it, they can do it. When we had our wedding anniversary [she and Gibson celebrated 20 years together in 2022], the dress code was long gowns for the ladies, and tie and tails for the men. Wow, everybody looked stunning. I’m quite old-fashioned and some might say behind the times. I really don’t care. I dress the way I want and everyone should dress the way they want. This is something I’m writing in my new book—that people often approach Percy and I, and say, “Oh, you’re all dressed up.” I don’t wear jeans, I hate jeans. I wear nicely cut trousers and a blazer to go out, and people consider that “so dressed up.” It’s just about dressing the way you feel the best.

You’ve got the new book out and last year the documentary This Is Joan Collins was released. What do we still not know about Joan Collins?

I’m writing my new book now, called Behind the Shoulder Pads: Stories I Only Tell My Friends. It’s a series of essays, stories and anecdotes. I have a whole chapter about parties. I just finished writing about Dodi Fayed [the lover of Princess Diana who died with her in a car accident in 1997]. So there’s more to come.

I interviewed the late comedian Joan Rivers several times. She trashed everyone, from Liz Taylor to Rosie O’Donnell to Britney Spears. But when I brought you up, she only had praise. Were you friends?

Yes. We were good friends. We were planning on doing a show together, in which we would play warring talk-show hosts. She was going to be like Barbara Walters, I’d be Diane Sawyer or another one of her rivals. They’ve sort of done it now with [the Apple TV+ series] The Morning Show. That’s what we were planning to do before Joan died [in 2014]. It would have been quite good, I think. Joan and I were never afraid to express our opinions, which many people seem to be today.

What’s your fondest memory of Queen Elizabeth?

I absolutely adored her, from the first time I saw her as a young girl. I kept a scrapbook of her. She was so beautiful. I met her a dozen times. She was inspirational and clever. She was a great woman. I was so upset when she died.

You’ve mentioned Prince Harry a couple of times. What are your thoughts on his book and all the interviews he’s been giving?

I think it’s slight overkill.

I must thank you, because years ago, a photographer in Montreal captured an image of me interviewing you on a film set. It’s a gorgeous photo of us. One stunning gay man saw the photo of you and I together and asked for my hand in marriage on account of it. So, thanks for that.

Awwww, that’s so sweet. Glad I could have helped out.

PRESS UPDATE : LOS ANGELES MAGAZINE .. MA MAISON ... JANUARY 2023 ..

Joan & Jackie at Ma Maison in 1984 for Past Imperfect Book Launch Party

 

How Ma Maison Became a Birthplace of California Cuisine

The faux French bistro on Melrose with the terrible food—that is, until Wolfgang Puck took over as chef—was L.A.’s most glamorous celebrity sandbox of the 70s

By Colman Andrews..

That’s Joan Collins having lunch on the patio and Lauren Hutton two tables over. There are Jack Lemmon, Jacqueline Bisset, Swifty Lazar, Rod Stewart, Billy Wilder. Orson Welles is here, but you can’t see him; he’s eating inside, alone, hidden in an alcove just to the right of the entrance. Wolfgang Puck is in the kitchen.

Just another afternoon at Ma Maison, circa 1979

A menu cover from the 1980s designed by French artist and Pablo Picasso muse Françoise Gilot. (DIGITAL COLLECTIONS OF THE LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY)

For more than a decade, Ma Maison, which opened 50 years ago this December on Melrose Avenue at Kings Road, was L.A.’s quintessential everyone-who’s-anyone restaurant, its most glamorous celebrity sandbox—the Chasen’s or Romanoff’s of the ’70s, the West Coast Elaine’s, the pre-Spago in more ways than one.

The man behind the place was a tall, handsome, deep-voiced young Frenchman named Patrick Terrail, descended from French restaurant royalty: his grandfather and great-grandfather had run famous Paris restaurants; his uncle, Claude Terrail, was then in charge of the celebrated La Tour d’Argent. Patrick was a bit of a black sheep. He’d moved to the U.S. at 17, studied hotel management at Cornell University, and worked at the Four Seasons and El Morocco in Manhattan before heading to L.A. and taking a job with Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer. In 1973, he decided to open a restaurant of his own, borrowing part of the $40,000 start-up money from Gene Kelly, one of his Uncle Claude’s regulars in Paris.

When Ma Maison fired up its oven—singular, the kitchen was that small—no one could have predicted what the restaurant would become. The interior, furnished on the cheap, had a generic imitation bistro look. The front patio, where it turned out everybody wanted to sit, was a cliché of low-rent SoCal outdoor living: AstroTurf flooring, white plastic chairs, café umbrellas.

The menu was hardly more ambitious—salade Niçoise, pâté maison, brochettes of chicken and beef. Patrick himself did some of the cooking at first. George Christy, reviewing the restaurant for this magazine, called the pâté “a joke” and the brochettes “tough, stringy, not especially flavorful.”

Things changed in 1975 when Patrick hired a young French-trained Austrian chef named Wolfgang Puck, who reproduced the old menu briefly but soon started turning out cream of sorrel soup, steamed oysters with baby vegetables, grilled chicken with sherry vinegar—dishes that might seem tame today but were cutting-edge California-nouvelle at the time. (It’s probably no accident that such future culinary stars as Mark Peel, Susan Feniger, Gordon Hamersley, and Josie Le Balch worked in Puck’s kitchen.)

For a couple of years in the latter 1970s, I had lunch every Thursday at Ma Maison, and I remember vividly the way it felt to walk into the place when it was running at full speed: exciting, a bit daunting, a little unreal, like opening a door into a secret chamber filled with everybody you’d ever heard of and being made to feel somehow at home even though you weren’t really part of the crowd.

Friday was supposed to be the day to lunch at Ma Maison, but whoever was casting Thursdays did a great job. Bisset and Lemmon were almost always there, but you’d also see Goldie Hawn, Michael Caine, Ursula Andress, Suzanne Pleshette, Ray Stark, John and Mo Dean, David Hockney (who drew one of the menu covers).

Joan launched the USA edition of Past Imperfect at Ma Maison 1984

Puck’s cooking and his amiable personality, inevitably described as “puckish,” were key to the restaurant’s success. But Patrick, who wore dark, double-breasted suits with Charvet ties and red carnation boutonnieres even on hot afternoons, contributed a showman’s sense of image-building—the famously unlisted phone number, the trophy-cars-only parking lot. He also had a wicked sense of humor, hanging the awards Ma Maison regularly won from the Southern California Restaurant Writers Association dangerously close to the urinals in the men’s room. (When he overheard a regular joking that he preferred cheeseburgers to this fancy French stuff, Patrick sent a busboy down the street to bring back a sackful and served them ceremoniously in place of whatever the guy had ordered.)

In 1981, Puck—by then a star chef—left to open Spago with his future wife, Barbara Lazaroff. To replace him, Patrick imported Claude Segal from the Michelin-starred La Ciboulette in Paris. His food was good and the celebrities kept coming, but some of the magic seemed to be slipping away, and the restaurant suffered a major blow in 1982 when Segal’s sous-chef killed his girlfriend, actress Dominique Dunne (Joan Didion’s niece). A rumor went around that Patrick had paid for the man’s attorney—it wasn’t true—but the affair cost the restaurant a number of prominent customers.

Patrick Terrail & Wolfgang Puck toast their Success!

Celebrities still ate at Ma Maison after Segal left in 1985 (Warren Beatty threw a party there for Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston), but Patrick must have sensed that the restaurant’s time had passed, and he closed the place and sold the property late that year. Puck, of course, went on to become one of the most celebrated chef-restaurateurs in the world.

After licensing the Ma Maison name to the new Sofitel Hotel at Beverly and La Cienega in 1985 and running a version of the restaurant there for a few years, Patrick moved to Georgia, where he got married and, for a time, ran a bistro and a regional magazine—both now defunct. He seems to have no regrets.

“You can only run one great restaurant in your life,” he likes to say.                                                                                                                                                          

PHOTO FLASHBACK : VARIETY CLUB OF NEW ZEALAND - AN EVENING WITH JOAN COLLINS .. 1997 ..

 To promote her autobiography Second Act, Joan went to New Zealand in 1997 to promote it and attended many events.. One of which was a special evening in aid of Variety Club New Zealand in celebration of Joan and Second Act and was held at Centra Auckland Hotel.  Here are some rare photos from the event ... 

PHOTO FLASHBACK : PARKINSON ... BBC .. 1998 ..

 Over the years Joan has appeared on hundreds of chats shows worldwide, one of the most famous of chat shows over many years has been the Parkinson show on BBC hosted by Michael Parkinson.. Joan last appeared on the show in 1998, here are some rare photos from the show and a look at the ticket and Joans BBC pass at the show..