© David Wigg
The evergreen Joan Collins tells David Wigg about her nationwide theatre tour and how a caring new husband put all the romance back in her life.
One Place you are
never gong to find Joan Collins is in the Australian bush as a contestant on the TV show I’m A Celebrity. . . Get Me Out Of Here! “I wouldn’t do it for a zillions pounds,” she says. “I wouldn’t want to be in the jungle. I don’t like all those creepy-crawlies.”
She has, however, been one of the 11 million viewers who watched the contestants suffer the humiliating challenges. She says: “Lord Brocket made me laugh. It’s bloody good entertainment but I don’t want
to get hooked on another one.” The enduring star of more than 55 films and dozens of televisions programs, Joan has more important things on her mind.
Next month, she embarks on a 16-week theatre tour starring in the romantic comedy Full Circle. During that period she will, for the first time, be on the road from Bromely in Kent to Glasgow. The leading role is made-to-measure for Joan. She plays rich and successful novelist Denise Darvel, a character who unexpectedly confesses to her three children that the handsome man in the portrait above the fireplace is not their father: in fact, they are all illegitimate. In the interests of respectability, they decide to search for a suitable father substitute.
The play, set in the Fifties and the brainchild of comedy writer Alan Melville, particularly appealed to Joan after she learned that Tallulah Bankhead and Yvonne Arnaud had played the lead in earlier productions. Joan accepts the tour is going to be tough for someone like herself who is used to being pampered. She will have to forsake her luxuries and the comforts of her three homes in London, New York and St. Tropez for provincial dressing rooms and a series of hotels.
Remarkably, she hasn’t stopped acting since she made her London stage debut in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.
She later went to RADA and was signed up as a Rank starlet. She remains as energetic and driven as ever. If you dare to mention retirement, Joan looks horrified. It’s clearly the last thing on her mind. “Retire? Why? I am a gypsy at heart. I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t enjoy it. I came into this business to be a stage actress. I am able to make any dressing room feel like home in 15 minutes. I have many candles, plants, photographs, rugs and heater. I have my coffee machine and bottle of wine for after the show. There’s something that appeals to me about the gypsy things. That’s why I’ve got three different places to live in.
“My sister Jackie asks me how I can live in three places. It just suits my temperament.
I don’t think I could be in one place all the time.” It’s 10am, but she has arrived at the Cinderella Bar of the London Palladium looking as glamorous as the image she has personified since she dazzled everyone with her Nolan Miller outfits as super-bitch Alexis Carrington Colby in the Eighties TV hit Dynasty. She is wearing a crimson leather suit, designed by Miller, stone-coloured crocodile shoes and a long, vintage Chanel chain of pearls dangling over a white blouse as well as matching pearl earrings. Two diamond rings sparkle on her hands. Nevertheless, Joan insists she is not rich: “I am high maintenance.” Apart from supporting her own lifestyle, she has always been there for her three children whenever they have needed financial help. She says: “I don’t have a trust fund. I don’t get residuals from Dynasty, which was my biggest earner. Then, I was the highest paid women on television. Those stars in Friends and Frasier would laugh at that now. They make $1 million an episode. I was making $110,000 and episode. Even the people who play butlers on some TV shows make that.
I’m rather good at spending money. I’m very good at making it but I’ve very bad with the bit in between, like investments. I’ve never had very good advisers.” Like her career, which is enjoying a revival, her love life has hit an all-time high since she married 39-year-old New York theatre manager Percy Gibson two years ago. They are inseparable and he will travel with her during the play’s tour in the role of theatre company manager.
Since he has come into her life,
she claims she is much happier and more content. Percy, the son of a Scottish mother and a Peruvian father, is 32 years her junior. Last Tuesday, while Joan was rehearsing, they celebrated their second wedding anniversary. “Percy is my ideal man.
He’s the man I have been looking for all my life. He is a perfect husband in every way. We’re not ones for parties. To me, you go to parties to meet somebody else. There’s not really much point in that because I’ve met the person I want to be with. He looks after my every need without being in any way a doormat. He likes taking care of me.”
Five-times-married Joan also like her man to be chivalrous. “When we are travelling, Percy wouldn’t dream of letting me touch a
suitcase, even thought I have packed six of them and they weigh about 10 tons. “He wouldn’t dream of letting me open my own car door and he carries my bag. he sends me flowers and we send each other cards. A relationship is something that needs air and water and feeding. You can’t take each other for granted.”
Joan and Percy, who has been married once before, met in America while she was touring in the play Love Letters but their love affair didn’t develop until much later,
while he was helping her edit her novel Star Quality.
“I was very upset one day and he was very comforting.” She then decided to break off her 13-year relationship with the London art specialist Robin Hurlstone. She and Percy got engaged and married at Claridges on February 17, 2002. She is also thrilled with the news that she is about to become a grandmother for the third time. Her artist son Sacha Newley (by her second husband Anthony Newley), who lives in New York, and his wife Angela Tassoni, a jewellery designer, are expecting their first child in May. Joan and Percy recently took her daughter Tara’s five-year-old daughter Miel to Disney World for a birthday treat.
Although Joan has had liaisons with younger men over 20 years, she claims she never consciously went in search of them. “It just happened,” she says.
“A lot of men of my age are set in their ways and chauvinistic. They have that kind of attitude towards women: “Oh well done little woman’, particularly men with money. I hate that. So what are the virtues of younger men? “They’re younger!” she replies, teasingly. “I have an enormous amount of energy. Younger men usually have a lot of energy and a lot of people my age have slowed down considerably.”
Joan Collins starts her tour of Britain with Full Circle
at Bromely Chruchill Theater on Marcy 11, followed by Southend, Stoke-On-Trent, Brimingham, Wimbledon, Milton Keynes, Brighton, Glasgow, Woking, Newscastle, Nottingham, Manchester, Norwich, Bath and Malvern. |
