Sunday Times 2
A Dame at last!
For a time, it looked as though the closest she would come to playing the Dame was her 2010 appearance in panto.
But after more than 60 years in showbusiness, I hear Joan Collins will finally receive a long-awaited damehood in the New Year’s Honours.
It would cap a remarkable resurgence in the evergreen star’s career following last year’s well-received memoirs, Passion For Life, and a successful run of sold-out one-woman shows.
Evergreen: Joan Collins as a pin-up in 1957
A lifelong Tory supporter, 81- year-old Joan was invited to Lady Thatcher’s funeral and was among the guests at the Conservative party’s £1,000-a-head Black and White Ball in February, which she attended with her chum, entrepreneur and London Mayoral hopeful Ivan Massow.
Massow, 47, reckons the gong is long overdue. ‘There has always been talk about it, there are pressure groups out there who are desperate for this to happen,’ he tells me. ‘She’s one of our biggest stars.’
Pal Christopher Biggins concurs: ‘I would be absolutely thrilled, there’s no one more deserving.’
After making her stage debut in A Doll’s House aged nine, she trained as an actress at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.
At 22, she headed to Hollywood and later made her name in raunchy movie adaptations of her sister Jackie’s bonkbuster novels The Stud and The Bitch.
But it was her award-winning role as shoulder-padded mega-bitch Alexis Carrington in Eighties soap Dynasty for which she became a global star.
The five-times-married mother of three is now settled with Percy Gibson, a half-Peruvian theatre producer who at 49 is 32 years her junior (‘If he dies, he dies!’ she once quipped in relation to their age gap).
The pair flit between homes in Los Angeles, London and St Tropez. Although she was awarded an OBE in 1997, Collins has always talked down her chances of a damehood.
In a rare moment of humility in 2006, she said: ‘I’ve no intention of lining up for my damehood. I wouldn’t get one. I don’t have the body of work of Judi Dench and Diana Rigg.
© Daily Mail, London