“I work because I love it. It’s the roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd.”
Here is my theory: Dame Joan Collins may not swagger among the pantheon of Britain’s greatest actors, but her acting was good enough to harm her. Snatched from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for starletdom by the Rank Organisation aged 17 – and now, at 90, still hard at work – two roles define her. The first is nymphomaniac businesswoman Fontaine Khaled from, the latter bearing the title that follows Collins like an invisible chat-show chyron.
In October, for example, she begins a months-long stage tour in the UK which will mine her extensive anecdotal seams. The tour follows the publication of her latest memoir and shares its name,“They used to call me the ostrich. I might get upset for an hour, or even a day, but then I bury my head in the sand and I get on with my life.”Does she keep working because she thinks she will die if she stops? “I work,” she explains, as if to a simpleton, “because I have to make a living”.
No one admits to such things, I say. “I’m not a very analytical person, Andrew,” she replies. “They used to call me the ostrich. I might get upset for an hour, or even a day, but then I bury my head in the sand and I get on with my life. That might make me sound frivolous or shallow, but life is not a bowl of cherries. Life is a bowl of cherry pips and I’ve had quite a few, particularly in the husband department.
But he was later. After Reed, she counted among her boyfriends the youthfully spotty Warren Beatty, by whom she became pregnant. He duly arranged an abortion. When Shirley MacLaine later asked what her brother, the famous lothario, was like in bed, Collins replied: “Overrated”. Kass, however, lost his London job and they all moved to Hollywood, where his company ran up debts. “Ron, unfortunately, became the victim of drugs and that’s why I was so anti-drug,” she says. “But I won’t go any further than that because we have a daughter.” Katyana is a mother herself and has escaped press attention.
So much has been written about Collins, and so much of it by her, I need to inquire whether the new book and stage show have anything left to reveal. “I’ll give you one hint,” she says. “I think the chapter is called ‘Who Is It?’ and it’s about when my sister was born and how angry I was and how I hated her, how I tried to kill her.”
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