Make up and memories as Joan Collins prepares for panto in Birmingham
Jun 24 2010 By Lorne Jackson
She didn’t like Bing, but she loved Bob – Joan Collins spills the beans to Lorne Jackson about her 60-year career as she takes to the stage here.
Everybody has a question to ask, everybody has an opinion. Everybody offers advice.
When it slips out that I’m interviewing Joan Collins, friends and colleagues froth into a fervour.
Nonchalance? Not a chance.
“Ask her about that terrible movie she made,” chirrups one bloke. “You know, the one where she gives birth to a demon baby, then it punches people from its cot.”
“What about all the men she’s been with?” titters a female journalist. “Actually, forget all the men. I just want to know about Warren Beatty. And take a tape measure, so she can qualify her statements.”
My mother is impressed enough to order me to get a hair cut.
I don’t bother. However, I do wear a new pair of socks. This is Joan Collins I’m meeting, after all. More than a mere actress, she is Hollywood royalty.
Though her regal bearing didn’t prevent her from stripping naked for a couple of raunchy 70s movies, The Stud and The Bitch, both written by sister, Jackie.
Blue blood demeanour mixing with blue movie daring. Only Joan.
It’s been a strange career, in the round. For one so iconic, there have been few memorable starring roles.
Dynasty provided her with a career high. In the 1980s she swanned into the ailing American soap – close to cancellation in its second season – and gave it some cut-glass English oomph.
Scene stealing magnificently as supervixen, Alexis Colby, she was the very devil in shoulder pads.
Shoulder pads? More like shoulder plateaus.
Now Joan has agreed to bring her larger than life persona to Birmingham this winter, where she will star as Queen Rat in the Hippodrome panto, Dick Whittington.
And here am I – with only my new socks as a line of defence – bracing myself to meet Queen Joan.
There isn’t much Hollywood glamour to welcome her to the city. A relentless drizzle of Midland rain splashes on the shoulders of a tramp, who shelters himself by hunkering into the side wall of the Hippodrome.
He sloshes and slurps from a bottle, filled with the sort of cheap cider that’s probably brewed using the same brand of apple that put Snow White in a coma.
Inside the theatre, things rapidly turn glamorous when I meet Joan’s agent.
A little old man in a very big suit, he reminds me of those old-style operators, who ran Hollywood from behind fat cigars during the Golden Era of the cinema.
