AFTER she had spent eight years as Alexis Colby, the public couldn’t distinguish between Dame Joan Collins and the fiercely ambitious maneater she immortalised in the US soap Dynasty.
Today, on her fifth marriage — with a man 31 years her junior — the 90-year-old actress says she understands why.
But unlike Alexis, who is probably languishing in a Californian jail or a rehab centre, Dame Joan has finally found true happiness with hubby number five, Percy Gibson.
In Louis Theroux’s latest interview for BBC2, she says he has confirmed her faith in love.
She adds: “I believe in marriage — which is why I’ve done it five times — and I finally have a wonderful marriage.
“Percy is 30-odd years younger than me, but I don’t even feel my age. I don’t even talk about it, I don’t even think about it.
“I have some friends around my age and I don’t find them interesting — everyone’s gotten older except me.”
Louis spoke to Dame Joan in her home in St Tropez in the South of France, where she invited him to look back on her incredible life.
Her career began in the Fifties, when she moved to the US to become a Hollywood starlet.
Her disastrous four-year first marriage to Northern Irish actor Maxwell Reed, who allegedly raped and hit her, ended in 1956.
In 1963 she married another performer, actor and singer Anthony Newley, with whom she had two children, but they divorced in 1971 after she discovered he had had multiple affairs — which she only found out when he featured his womanising in a film that she co-starred in.
Then in 1972 she married her third hubby, film producer, music executive and one-time manager of The Beatles, Ron Kass.
The marriage lasted 11 years and after their divorce in 1983 they reportedly remained close, and she cared for him when he was ill with terminal cancer, up to his death in 1986.
By then she had been married to her fourth husband, Swedish former pop star Peter Holm, for a year, but the union lasted just 19 months.
Though Joan’s love life was often disastrous, in the Eighties her professional life took off when she began playing Alexis, the scheming ex-wife of Dynasty’s central character Blake Carrington.
Though it brought her huge fame and fortune, even this part caused her problems in the long run. After Dynasty, casting directors and reviewers refused to forget the role she was most famous for.
She said: “I think I’m still identified very much so by many people with Alexis. I’m not saying I’m not appreciated, I think I’ve become more so, but there’s a grudging ‘Yeah, she’s terrific in many ways but she can’t act, she can just play these roles’.
“Early reviews of everything only talked about ‘The way she looked’, or ‘The way she swung her hips’, or ‘The way she made google eyes’. They were always half-assed and snide.”
The other characteristic she was often said to share with Alexis was as a maneater, but Joan says this is simply a sexist term and shows the double standards that were used when it came to women who enjoyed sex.
She said: “If you compare how I was in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies in between husbands with the way that some actresses — I shan’t mention any names — are today, I was positively nun-like really. Yeah, I had a lot of boyfriends at (drama school) Rada — it was the normal things that you do. You try out different permutations of men.”
Joan discovered the same double standards whenever she discussed having a career too.
She said: “People always talk to women about ambition as if it were a dirty word. I’ve never ever seen a man accused of being ambitious.
“I wanted to be successful, yes. I wanted to make a living, yes, and I wanted to make a living in a world that I enjoyed.”
As a sexy, glamorous woman Joan has always struggled to be taken seriously as an actress, particularly when she matured and started a family in the Sixties.
When she returned to work in the Seventies she found herself put into another pigeonhole that she hated.
She said: “I remember Sue Mengers, a big Hollywood agent, years ago, after my children were four and six . . . I said, ‘I really would like to get back in the business’.
“And she said, ‘Honey, take off your make-up and don’t get your hair done and wear some drab clothes, so they take you seriously’.
“I said, ‘Is that really what it’s going to take?’ I grew up with a mother and ten aunts who were all incredibly glamorous.
“They always had their hair done and always wore make-up and wore nice clothes, even if they were going to the supermarket.
“Why should I throw all that up so some ditsy director can think I can act? So I decided to be true to myself.”
Though the huge success of Dynasty didn’t come late in life, Joan believes the seeds of her success, and that of her late sister, writer Jackie Collins, were sown in their early years by their parents.
She said: “We were told as children to just get on with our lives. We were not played with, we were not entertained, and so we therefore had a vast amount of hobbies, and all siblings are competitive in a way.”
While Joan pursued acting, Jackie went into writing, producing a long line of bonkbuster novels, and died of cancer aged 77 in 2015, leaving Dame Joan bereft.
She said: “Unfortunately a lot of people in my life she hated. Luckily she adored Percy and we all got along in the last, sadly, few years of her life.
“It’s so sad. I think of her all the time, but that’s life, isn’t it?”
