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“If the champagne is too burned for your taste, don’t drink it,” Joan purrs for the benefit of our cover-shoot videographer, repeating her most iconic Dynasty line in that famously curtsey-inducing, thespian voice. “The caviar, however, is cooked to absolute perfection,” she riffs, imperiously raising one eyebrow, a smirk crossing her lips. Somewhere at the back, even a security guard claps. It sets the tone. After all, above all else, Dame Joan is a performer – and today, she’s brought her A-game. What fun.
“Ellen [von Unwerth, our photographer] had me doing things I’ve never done before,” she tells me a few weeks later over Zoom. “I was just behaving like a very, very outrageous person.” Considering we’ve seen Joan scrapping in a lily pond and careering down a mudslide dressed in a power suit, to hear her say this is quite an achievement. But it’s also testament to a few things. One, that while she may be famed for playing the ultimate diva in Alexis Carrington (a career- and era-defining role with which she’s often conflated), the reality is that she’s also a really, really good sport. And two, that her joie de vivre remains totally undiminished. “It’s innate,” she tells me, having once described herself as being born with the happy gene. “According to my parents, I had a huge love of life from the very beginning.” Neither of those attitudes should be sniffed at. “I never think about age, and I never want to be defined by it,” she insists, by way of explanation.
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Joan’s feelgood philosophy is contagious, as our crew can testify. The set feels less like work and more like we’ve been welcomed into Joan’s hyperreal world; one where she playfully scolds the butler (our male model, Pascal), and spontaneously regales us with God Save The King from a stage that just happens to be there. Perhaps stages just manifest themselves wherever she goes?
Joan spends every summer in the South of France, her home playing host to a revolving door of meticulously picked, equally jet-set pals from around the globe – some of whom popped in to our shoot to say hello, have a glass of bubbles (not burned) and just generally add to the fun. And fun is very much key. As a result, her summertime Instagram account, which she manages herself, is a heady mix of headscarf-wearing Riviera glamour, rosé and dancing on yachts. The rest of the year it’s peppered with Alexis Carrington memes and Joan inadvertently out-glamming famous friends over the decades. A recent example is a picture of her and Liz Taylor with the caption, “I always adored Elizabeth Taylor – we had a lot in common, particularly our love of evening gowns… and getting married.”
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As if to prove my point, we wrap our interview as Joan has to run. She’s got another famous Liz over for lunch – Hurley. It’s non-stop, but perhaps that’s her secret. After writing 19 books, winning a Golden Globe, having three children, getting married five times, starring in countless movies and still selling out one-woman stage shows (the next one is in London on 22nd October), slowing down doesn’t seem to be in Joan’s vocabulary. “Well, I’ve done nothing for two months,” she points out, as if that’s an unreasonably long break. I daren’t bring up the word ‘retirement’, but I do venture that a summer holiday is more than acceptable – especially when many younger celebrities are moving at a comparatively glacial pace. It transpires that she may be doing one more book, as well as her aforementioned show, One Night Only. “I still have one big goal,” she says energetically, “and that’s to do a movie that’s been written for me called American Duchess. It’s about the last 20 years of Wallis Simpson’s life after King Edward dies… horrendous years. It’s a great script.”
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Regular red-carpet invitations also remain no stranger to Joan’s inbox. Earlier this year, she attended both the Vanity Fair Oscars party and The Emmys, where she received a standing ovation from an (understandably) adoring crowd of A-listers. Alex, her longtime friend and publicist, also tells me that Joan would love to keep all the couture gowns that Bazaar has had bespoke-made for her. “She’s already got events planned in that she wants to wear them to.” Of course she does. She’s Joan Collins and she’s going to outlive us all.
So between a zest for life, a foot placed firmly on the accelerator and a flat refusal to acknowledge age – “Everybody’s gotten older except me,” she once said – have we cracked the code? I’d wager humour has a great deal to do with it, too. When questioned about the 32-year age gap between her and 59-year-old husband, Percy Gibson, she quipped, “If he dies, he dies.”
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But one does not maintain such a tongue without keeping one’s mind just as razor-sharp. “I read voraciously. I read five newspapers a day and I’ve read 10 books since I’ve been in the South of France,” she tells me. I ask what the last book she read was. She shoots back, “Do you really think I want to give oxygen to another writer?” There she is. The diva herself. It’s thrilling to see her in action.
As quickly as Joan might deploy a pithy put-down, however, she can switch into quite a surprising vulnerability, openly sharing her highs and lows. That light and shade is quite something to witness. While we all contain multitudes, Joan has lived a lot of life to boot. From marrying four men whose treatment of her beggars belief, (from swindling and adultery to the most heinous of all, rape), to relentlessly making her way to the top. “I worked very hard to get where I am – and I was brought up to think ‘no handouts’. No one is going to just give you everything. I loved movie stars but I never wanted to be one – I wanted to be on stage. I think people that nowadays just want to be famous for fame’s sake are pathetic.” Not only this, but how many people can still recall discussing predatory men-filled, casting-couch horrors with Marilyn Monroe, or what it was like to date Marlon Brando – or Warren Beatty? It’s little wonder she’s written 19 books – she’s lived 19 lives.
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Monroe and Brando were the level of icon Joan was rubbing shoulders with back when she moved to Hollywood in her 20s, getting signed under contract by 20th Century Fox. “You’re not aware that you’re living through an iconic era at the time, though. And you’re also not aware that people like Elvis Presley and James Dean, who were around when I was around, were iconic at the time, either.” What about today’s icons, I ask. “Oh dear,” she says. “It’s hard to answer.” Then, after some thought, “I’m way past having fan crushes on people like I used to, but I suppose Taylor Swift is iconic. She’s a good example of clean living. She doesn’t do overly suggestive things which, quite frankly – and I’m not naming names here – a lot of performers do these days. But who else is iconic? Oh my God…” she trails off, struggling to suggest anyone else. “It’s very difficult to be iconic under 40,” she settles on, before turning the question on me: “Who do you think is iconic?” “Er, Keith Richards?” I splutter, very much meaning it, but also not really reading the room/ audience. She does, however, namecheck Mick Jagger later on, so maybe I wasn’t too far off after all.
But what about back in those halcyon days? “Marilyn Monroe, absolutely. Marlon Brando, who I find extraordinary that a lot of people don’t know who he is. Our late Queen Elizabeth, without question, who was just fantastic and a role model in every shape and form. And Ava Gardner, who was a beautiful woman and somebody who I emulated a lot physically when I played Alexis.”
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It was largely thanks to Alexis that Joan became the poster girl for the Gekkoesque decadence of the ‘80s; a decade that she answers was “definitely” the best to live through. (“Yes, I’ve been famous for many years. Let’s not do ages,” she laughs.) Playing the role of everyone’s favourite Machiavellian ex-wife, Joan was introduced in the second season of Dynasty in a bid to revive the show’s dwindling numbers. Less than two seasons later, it was the most-watched show in America.
“I just loved the clothes that everyone was wearing in the ‘80s. Everybody just wanted to look good, not only in Dynasty, but also in Charlie’s Angels and, oh… what’s the other one? Help me out, Alex…” Could it be that Joan Collins, decades on, is still throwing shade at Dynasty’s arch TV rival, Dallas? It’s too delicious to be true – but then, Dame Joan doesn’t forget a thing. “Dallas?” Alex offers, bravely. “Dallas! Yes, I think everybody was so well-dressed in all of those shows and that filtered down to women [in real life].” It’s little wonder they were inspired. Dynasty’s famed costume designer, the great Nolan Miller, had an alleged budget for clothes that was $30,000 per episode. $100,000 today. That’s a lot of shoulder pads.
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“If you look at women in newsreels back then, they’re all very well-dressed, they all have very good hair… and they seem to care, you know? They were more individual.” She pauses, “I don’t mean to mock women today. I mean, it’s a different life. Life is much tougher now, I think, but we all have to contend with it. So yes, I loved the clothes in the ‘80s but I also loved everything about it. Although my personal life was terrible, because I went through two divorces and a very serious accident with my youngest daughter. But I had become very, very successful and I can’t say I didn’t enjoy all the dressing up.”
Predictably, Joan is on a roll when talking about fashion, animatedly sharing tales of creating her dolls’ clothes as a child, drawing the costumes for her sister, Jackie’s, books before they were published, and even having her designs made for her mother and aunt. “They both had a dressmaker, so I used to design things for them around the time of the New Look, and they would often have them made.”
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Her affinity with fashion is still in full force, with Joan giving feedback on every sketch our Middle Eastern couturiers presented. “What I like about the Emirates and Saudi Arabia is that women there like to be able to dress up, even when they don’t have to. I have friends from there who love to be beautifully dressed. I respect that,” she tells me. “Sometimes I get mocked for it. Percy and I will get into an elevator somewhere and we’ll be wearing blazers, shirts and chinos, and I’ll be wearing a straw hat and people get in, look us up and down and say [disparagingly], ‘Ooh, you’re so dressed up.’” Who would dare mock Dame Joan Collins, is what I want to know. “Well, they don’t necessarily know it’s me…” she laughs.
As we draw the interview to a close, I ask if she has a motto she lives by. “Yes,” Joan answers without skipping a beat. “Every day, I want to learn something, achieve something and enjoy something,” she says, quite possibly articulating the secret to happiness. “Another is, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. I wish I’d said that.” She may not have said it, but she certainly lived it.
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Editor-in-Chief: Olivia Phillips. Photographer: Ellen von Unwerth. Art Director: Paul Solomons. Stylist: Sascha Lillic. Hair & Make-Up: Alyn Waterman. Senior Producer: Steff Hawker. Local Producer: Filipine Guyonnaud. Dresser: Chrissy Maddison. 1st Assistant: Frederic Trohler. 2nd Assistant: Octave Monteiro De Oliveira. Digital Technician: Ovidiu Oltean. Styling Assistant: Celeste Pettorelli. Male Model: Pascal L. Seamstress: Myriam Savarese. Photographer’s Agent: 2B Management. Personal Stylist to Dame Joan Collins: Rene’ Horsch. Special thanks to Alex Silver and Le Beauvallon, Bay of Saint-Tropez From Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s September 2024 issue.
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