For seven decades now, Dame Joan Collins has graced our screens, big and small, with her commanding presence of confidence, beauty, and wit. Arguably best known for bringing to life the iconic pop culture character of Alexis Carrington on the hit 1980s television series Dynasty, Collins is ready to tell her life story in the form of a new documentary on BritBox called This Is Joan Collins. But much like she has been throughout her entire Hollywood career, on and off camera, Collins continues to take matters into her own hands.
“Well, I’ve been asked to do them several times over the years and the format was always the same,” Collins, 88, tells me of the many documentary pitches she has received over the years. “Yes, we will get a bunch of your friends in, Joan, and they’ll all talk about you and say how fabulous you are - blah, blah, blah! And I said I don’t want to do that, and so I just waited until [producer] Karen [Steyn] came to me and said ‘Well, we have this idea that you would narrate the [documentary] yourself and we would take most of the text from your autobiographies that you’ve written.’ That’s what we did.”
In the documentary, Collins opens up in great detail about her early acting career as the golden age of Hollywood started to dwindle. She also speaks candidly about the ups-and-downs of her five marriages and her devotion as a mother throughout much of that turmoil. Collins goes on to tell me that she did not discuss the passing of her younger sister, popular novelist Jackie Collins, because she says the loss was too sad for her. What she does decide to share in This Is Joan Collins is her daughter Katy’s traumatic accident in the early 1980s, when she was hit by a car and had to undergo a long journey toward recovery.
When I asked Collins if she lives with any regrets in her life today, she says, “Well, of course I live with regrets. I mean, I regret that my daughter was knocked down by a car. I regret some my marriages - I did that too many times. I was stupid. Well, I don’t regret marrying Tony [Newley] because I have two wonderful children [Tara and Alexander] and marrying Ron [Kass], I had one beautiful daughter [Katy]. I sincerely regret marrying the Swede [Peter Holm].”
Collins is now married to Hollywood producer Percy Gibson and she informs me that they just had their 20th wedding anniversary, referring to Gibson as her partner for life forever.
While Collins was dealing with divorce off-screen, she certainly found her footing on-screen when she joined the fairly successful at the time new Dynasty series at the start of season two in 1981, playing the ex-wife of leading character Blake Carrington, played by actor John Forsythe.
With Collins now onboard as Alexis Carrington during a time when DVR playback and video streaming did not yet exist, Dynasty reached the number one spot on television during its 1984-85 season with a Nielsen rating of 25.0 and an impressive average of 21.2 million households tuning in each week to see what type of drama Alexis would stir up next.
Collins says of her beloved character, “The thing that I liked about Alexis was her wit. She was very witty, she was cutting, and she didn’t let anybody get anything over on her.”
A real-life moment when Collins tapped into her inner-Alexis was when she became aware during the height of Dynasty’s popularity that her male co-star Forsythe was being paid a considerable amount more than her. During a 2021 interview, Collins disclosed that she was making $15,000 an episode when she joined Dynasty, while Forsythe was taking in around $25,000 to $30,000 per episode. During a time in Hollywood when male-to-female pay contrasts were often known about but not often questioned, Collins made the bold choice to speak up for what she believed that she had earned.
“Well, everybody told me that I shouldn’t do it,” Collins recalls. “‘John has been around the business a lot longer than you.’ I thought Well, so what? And of course, he always had to be front and center of any ads. If you look at any of the ads from that time, even if you look at the DVDs that are out there, John Forsythe - Blake is always in the middle surrounding a bevy of women. And eventually I thought, here I am on the cover of every magazine in America, in Europe, in Asia. John Forsythe isn’t on the cover - why shouldn’t I get parity? And so, I went to [producer] Aaron [Spelling] and apparently, I did not know this but he had it in his contract that he always had to be paid more than any of the other people. So although they gave me a raise, they didn’t make it equal but I didn’t know that until after the show closed, but it didn’t matter, you know? I mean, I’m not greedy. Well, not really (laughs).”
Dynasty ran on television from 1981 until 1989. Collins remembers it being a great show, at least for the first three or four years. She says the writing fell apart shortly after that, because the ABC network wanted to kill the show, according to Collins. When Collins ironically teamed up with Linda Evans, the actress who often played Alexis’s feud-fueled scene partner on-screen as Krystle Carrington, to speak up together to producers about why they were being given “these awful scripts and these stupid storylines,” Collins says producers did not take notice of their concerns.
These days, Collins still gets a considerable amount of scripts sent her way and seems to have a much more laid-back approach toward contracts, knowing her value. When I asked Collins how she negotiates salary on projects today, she says, “Well, I just have my agent get on with it and just tell him what I want and what I think I deserve and he usually gets it or doesn’t.”
So, what is a day in the life like in 2022 for Joan Collins? “Well everything is different, you see, because we are right now in LA where we have an apartment but most of the time, we live in London where I also have an apartment and where my children and grandchildren live. So here, it’s really seeing friends, it’s reading scripts. It’s going swimming if one can. I don’t really have any hobbies. Can you count reading as a hobby? Photography? I’m very interested in fashion. I design a lot of my clothes. Last night, we played poker with friends.” In true Alexis Carrington fashion, when I asked Collins if she has a good poker face, she smiled at me with a steady stare saying, “Well, I usually win.”
I wrapped up my conversation with this life-long Hollywood legend and trailblazer in many respects, wondering what she would say to her former self, the Joan Collins who had just arrived in Hollywood as a teenager, looking to build a successful life for herself. Without hesitation, Collins confidently answers with, “You have a lot more power than you think you did.”
