Dame Joan Collins: I was taking supplements before they were all the rage
The actress is as sprightly as ever but insists there is no secret to her longevity..
Dame Joan Collins is fighting fit, but you don’t have to take her word for it: she has the paperwork to prove it. “I just finished making a movie, My Duchess, a few months ago,” she says of her latest role, in which she portrays Wallis Simpson in her twilight years, alongside a glittering vintage cast including Isabella Rossellini, Charles Dance and Miranda Richardson. “Before we began filming I had to have a medical test for the insurance, to confirm I was OK to work. They told me I was more healthy than any of the other cast!”
Dame Joan has recently returned from the biopic’s premiere in Cannes, where her youthful appearance on the red carpet prompted a flurry of articles about how she has stayed so sprightly. “Somebody wrote that I take an avocado a day, which is completely untrue,” she exclaims, with mock outrage.
With a career spanning over eight decades (Dame Joan made her acting debut in a stage production of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in 1942, aged 9), she remains every inch the Hollywood icon. Arriving for our chat on the arm of her fifth husband, 61-year-old Percy Gibson, Dame Joan is dressed in an expensively tailored black jacket, complete with the sort of dramatic shoulder pads Dynasty’s Alexis Carrington Colby would be proud of, and a bow that nips her in perfectly at the waist. A hefty rope of pearls and a slick of crimson lipstick complete the look.
There are, however, she insists, no tricks to her longevity. “I have very good genes – I’m very lucky. My father lived to be 87, and for somebody born in 1903 that’s pretty amazing,” she says. “My mother took incredibly exceptional care of me and my sister. When we were growing up she gave us all supplements when nobody was taking supplements.”
When I interject, to ask what specifically she and her novelist sister, Jackie, took, Dame Joan wafts her hand around as if she wants to bat away the question like a fly, exclaiming, “I don’t know, I was too young – all kinds of things,” before adding: “Oh you know, cod liver oil, Virol” – a syrup made from bone marrow, malt extract, beef fat and eggs and marketed for infants – “horrible things like that”.
We meet at the ribbon cutting of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center’s new outpost on London’s Harley Street. For decades, the original hospital in Los Angeles has been the go-to medical centre for celebrities, treating A-listers from Lucille Ball and Frank Sinatra to Elizabeth Taylor and Kim Kardashian. Now it is bringing its combination of “high-quality primary care, executive health and concierge medicine” to the UK’s private healthcare market.
Joan’s own patient journey there began in 2011, following a back injury. “I was in LA filming this television series called American Horror Story – and it was indeed a horror story,” she quips. “All of the cast were sitting around on this incredibly cold soundstage, which had been built on the Paramount lot. The whole crew were wearing scarves and sitting in chairs with no backs for weeks. I remember waking up in the middle of the night in screaming agony, so my husband, Percy, called Dr Lawrence Piro, the medical director of Cedars‑Sinai, who I had met before socially. He sent an ambulance and within five or 10 minutes I was in Cedars being taken care of, which was wonderful. From then on I would go and visit him whenever I was in LA, because I believe that taking care of yourself is one of the most important things.”
It seems that Dame Joan’s back has been an ongoing concern in recent years – in July 2022 she was airlifted to the Princess Grace Hospital in Monaco, having been rendered immobile by a trapped nerve. It stopped her exercising for some time, but she’s mobile again and impressively agile. “I work out with my trainer a couple of times a week – just basic Pilates-type exercise, rather than using one of those [reformer] pilates machines, though,” she clarifies.
Recalling her previously saying that she took morning walks with Percy, I ask whether that’s still part of her daily routine. She looks appalled. “I hate walking – it bores me,” she cries. “I’ll walk around my apartment tweaking the flowers, but that’s about it.” Turning to Dr Piro, she says: “That sounds so ridiculous, and it will look ridiculous when you see it in print, but it’s true.”
Dr Piro says he and Dame Joan have “worked together to optimise her health over the years”, adding: “We don’t ever talk about things like age – people often bring that up, which she particularly dislikes.” He’s not wrong: before our chat, I’m advised at least three times not to raise the subject with the actress. “But the fountain of youth is curiosity, and Joan is the most curious, engaged, intelligent person that you might meet.”
She’s certainly a firm believer that prevention is better than cure, saying she will go to the doctor “even if I have a pimple on my face that doesn’t go after a couple of months,” continuing: “I will go before it gets serious. Someone who was very close to me had a lump and did not check because she thought it would go, but it didn’t and then she died, which she shouldn’t have. Had she had it taken care of, she would have been fine.”
What have been Dr Piro’s top tips for helping her stay well? “I think it was if your back twinges, lie flat on the ground,” she says, before adding that probably his best piece of advice might be to not allow yourself to get injured or to slip. “Anybody over the age of 60 who falls is doomed,” she says melodramatically. “It’s really true, because it keeps you out of the gym, you lose your flexibility, and everything spirals down.” It seems she still lives by the mantra “If you slow down, you die” – and clearly has no intention of retiring anytime soon.
“I just believe in healthy living,” she says. “I don’t eat junk, I get eight hours of sleep, I exercise. It’s very simple.”
I’m impressed to hear she’s still sleeping through the night, something many women struggle with in midlife and beyond. But it transpires that even Dame Joan has succumbed to the dreaded 3am wake-up; she’s just learned not to let it ruin her nights. “I heard about this thing called second sleep. It means that if you wake up at three or four o’clock in the morning, you don’t worry about it – you either have a cup of something or you read,” she explains. “So I go to bed at 10 or 10.30pm, I go straight to sleep, then when I wake up at three or four o’clock I’ll read on my iPad or do something for half an hour or so, then I go back to sleep again until seven.”
“What do I read? I’m not going to tell you!” she says with a playful smile.
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