The Untold Truth Of Joan Collins

Joan Collins has certainly experienced the extreme ups and downs of a Hollywood acting career, yet that's to be expected. As the British thespian's IMDb credits make clear, that career began in the 1950s and has extended to the present, even though she celebrated her 88th birthday (with a star-studded bash, of course) in May 2022.

Throughout that long and winding road, one role continues to loom large: Alexis Carrington, the scheming ex-wife of mogul Blake Carrington (Robert Forsythe) on mega-hit 1980s primetime soap "Dynasty." "The thing that I liked about Alexis was her wit," Collins said of her iconic character in an interview with Forbes. "She was very witty, she was cutting, and she didn't let anybody get anything over on her."

Of course, the same can be said about Collins herself, who famously fought to be paid as much as Forsythe and vocally complained to "Dynasty" producers about "these awful scripts and these stupid storylines" in the show's waning days. Having been firmly entrenched in the Hollywood firmament for eight consecutive decades, there's not a lot that this legendary star's fans don't know about her — or is there? To find out, keep on reading to discover the untold truth of Joan Collins. 

Joan Collins made her screen debut at age 17 when, according to IMDb, she was cast as a "beauty queen contestant" in the 1951 British film "Bikini Baby." Sadly for the future star, she continued to find herself cast in similarly vapid roles. "I was typecast from the time I was put under contract aged 17," she told The Irish Times. "I was typecast as the smoldering British bad girl, I played baby prostitutes, I played juvenile delinquents. I have been typecast for most of my life." 

In hindsight, Collins has some advice she wishes she could have given to herself when she was a struggling young actor navigating the perils of Hollywood. As she revealed in an interview with The Jewish Chronicle, she would tell herself, "You're better than people say you are. I think I got a lot of negativity when I started. 'She can't act, she's pretty and good looking, coasting on her looks.'"

She could see that much of that early criticism was in response to her beauty, based on the incorrect assumption that someone so good looking couldn't possibly be a good actor. "It's very unfair. I got tarred and feathered with it," she told The Jewish Chronicle. "But I'm used to that kind of negativity, I got a lot of it. And my reviews, oh my god! Really bad! I got used to it and I'm still here and working."

There's no denying that Joan Collins is a star, and a major one at that. However, stardom wasn't what she was setting out to achieve when she first launched herself into an acting career when she was still a teenager. "I never came into this business wanting to be a star. I wanted to be an actress," she explained in an interview with O.Canada. 

In fact, she added, her original ambition was geared toward a career in theater. "I didn't particularly want to go into the movies — I wanted to be an actress on stage," she said. And despite being in her late 80s, Collins plans on continuing to defiantly defy Father Time. "I'm going to work as long as I can," she added. "As long as people still give me jobs."

She's the first to admit that not all of those jobs have been worth remembering. Speaking with The New York Times, she pointed to 1997 schlock-horror flick "The Empire of the Ants" as a low point. Yet regardless of how terrible the material she's given to work with, Collins has always been a professional. "You do the best you can," she told the Times. "You learn your lines, you hit your marks and you get on with it."

Following the success of "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing," Joan Collins' star began to rise in Hollywood. More roles, and bigger ones, followed, including the 1957 drama "Island in the Sun," in which she was part of a cast that included James Mason, Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte, in one of his earliest film roles. 

While shooting the film, Collins and Belafonte couldn't deny their mutual attraction. "He was 31, six foot one, with melting brown eyes, a strong nose and close-cropped black hair. His sexual allure was accentuated by tight trousers and a shirt opened to reveal caramel-coloured skin," Collins wrote in her 2013 memoir "Passion for Life," according to an excerpt published in the Daily Mail. "Although we had no scenes together, the all-British crew teased me relentlessly when they noticed how often Belafonte — who was married — threw me suggestive glances."

In Collins' recollection, Belafonte was "mesmerizing, and we soon began an affair, away from prying eyes, in my tiny apartment," she shared. However, it was also clear that Belafonte had no intention of ending his marriage. That was why, Collins wrote, "after a few exciting liaisons, we knew we had to cool it. He went back to his wife and I moved on."

As a scan through Joan Collins' IMDb credits indicated, by the mid-1960s her stardom had lost enough luster that she was no longer appearing in feature films, but had jumped one rung lower to television, appearing in such series as "Batman," "Star Trek," and "Mission: Impossible." 

By the following decade, Collins came to the sad realization that her prospects had dwindled considerably now that she was past 40. Upon returning to Hollywood after spending five years in England, her son Alexander Newley wrote in his memoir "Unaccompanied Minor: A Memoir" (via The Mail on Sunday), Collins "realized her time in England had damaged her prospects." He recalled that period as "a demeaning nightmare." As the Daily Mail recalled, things had become so dire that Collins' agent sat her down and suggested it was time to put acting behind her and find another vocation — become a writer, perhaps, like her younger sister Jackie Collins.

With no offers on the horizon and bills to play, recalled the Daily Mail, Collins hopped into her gold Mercedes and drove to the unemployment benefit office in Santa Monica. "Weren't you Joan Collins?" asked the clerk, prompting the increasingly embarrassed Collins to mutter, "I still am." She put in her application, and was told she'd likely receive her first unemployment check in a couple of weeks. Collins, however, ultimately decided on another course of action by taking her destiny into her own hands. 

Joan Collins' comeback paved the way for the biggest role of her career: Alexis Carrington on "Dynasty." While the show had struggled to find an audience in its first season, the addition of Collins in Season 2 provided just the jolt "Dynasty" needed, becoming one of television's hottest shows. Despite the show's success, Collins and co-star John Forsythe — who played her ex-husband — did not get along. In fact, as she explained on "The Graham Norton Show," Forsythe didn't speak to her for "a whole season."

Their mutual dislike, she told O.Canada, didn't improve when she made a disturbing discovery. "Stupid me — it took me five or six or seven years to realize that in every single photo that the studio sent out, in every single ad, [John] Forsythe was always in the centre," she recalled. "And then I found out that his contract said that he always had to be in the centre and he always had to make at least a certain amount of money more than the other actresses."

Appearing on "Piers Morgan's Life Stories," via Page Six, Collins recalled that when she was earning $15,000 per episode, Forsythe was raking in between $25,000 to $30,000, due to his contract stipulating he be paid "$5,000 an episode more than anybody else in the cast." Collins summed up her feelings about her late co-star by describing him as a "misogynistic p***k."

By her own admission, Joan Collins has not been lucky when it comes to marriage. Her first four marriages — to actor Maxwell Reed, singer Anthony Newley, talent manager Ron Kass, and Swedish pop singer Peter Holm — all ended in divorce. That fourth union, the shortest of all her marriages, lasted just two years, with Collins seeking to have the whole thing annulled; as she subsequently told Forbes, "I sincerely regret marrying the Swede." So bitter was her split with Holm, she told the Guardian, "after that I didn't get married again for 15 years."

When she did tie the knot again, it was with producer Percy Gibson, who is more than three decades her junior. "He's the best, I can't imagine life without him," she gushed in an interview with The Times. "He's the rock that holds our family together. Thank God I married somebody 30 years younger than me. I couldn't bear to be married to someone my own age."

During an appearance on U.K. chat show "This Morning," as reported by Closer Weekly, Collins laid out the three rules she follows to maintain her successful marriage with Gibson. "Don't marry an actor! Rule No. 1," she quipped. "Separate loos is rule No. 2 ... and I think one has arguments, but to always be forgiving."

During the final season of "Dynasty," Joan Collins got a hard-fought raise, earning $120,000 per episode — but there was a catch. "I became the highest-paid woman on television only on the last season, and when I reported to work, they said: 'Oh, you're only going to be in 10 episodes because we can't afford you now.' I thought that was a bit mean," she told The Guardian. 

Several decades later, Celebrity Net Worth estimated that Collins was worth $20 million. However, she's been known to balk at being described as wealthy. As the Daily Mail reported, Collins was once interviewed by BBC journalist Michael Buerk, who asked what motivated her, because "after all, you're rich." Collins snapped back, telling him, "What's rich? I'm not exactly rich, no. Rich, as Robert Wagner said to me, is having f*** you money. I don't have that and I've a lifestyle to support."

However, Collins is also not one to get bogged down with financial details. "My whole financial affairs are confusing," she explained in an interview with the Daily Mail, noting that her husband, Percy Gibson, took care of that aspect of their lives. "Percy's brilliant with the money," she said. "He looks after the houses and runs our life."