She left the company after marrying Newley and struggled to get back into it. The documentary features clips from a certain low point, the movie “The Empire of the Ants” (1977) of real estate investors versus mutant insects. How did she deal with schlocky material? “You’re doing your best,” she said. “You learn your rules, you hit your points and you get to work with them.”
Rarely could she escape typecasting, but she shrugged off that too and recounted a conversation she had with the actor John Gielgud, in which he told her that because she could never escape her physicality, she would never see an ugly woman. could play. “It was like that for a certain number of years,” she said.
She believes that good looks can be a deterrent when it comes to quality roles: “What the young actresses of today realize is why most of them try to look as ordinary as possible.”
In the late 1970s, she made a comeback with two softcore films – “The Stud” and “The Bitch” – adapted from novels by her sister Jackie Collins. This exposure led to her most famous role, Alexis in Aaron Spelling’s nighttime soap opera “Dynasty”.
Despite the much publicized battle on set and the producers’ insignificant response to her demands for equal pay, she remains proud of ‘Dynasty’. Many of the memorabilia that hung in her apartment date from that time. “It was glamorous,” she said. “It was about very, very rich people, most of them handsome.” She compared it to the current hit “Succession”, although she noted that on “Succession” they wear more shabby clothes.
“Dynasty” ended more than three decades ago. Collins hasn’t played a great part since then. She thinks she knows why. “Casting directors say, ‘Oh no, we can’t use Joan Collins in this vixen, bitch part, because it’s too obvious.’ And ‘Oh no, we can’t have her in this other role. She can only do vixen bitches.’”
