JOAN COLLINS

Joan Collins is one of the great survivors.

Her long career has gone through many phases, and both her career and her private life have experienced highly publicised vicissitudes. She made her name originally as a glamorous young movie actress, but also did considerable stage work, and later moved into television with great success and began writing novels. Today Joan is famous as an ageless beauty, a major star of television melodrama and an international sophisticate.

Her early period when she appeared in lightweight movies and posed for pin-up photographs can now be seen as merely the initial stage of an extended career. At the time however it was assumed to be the most Joan would ever achieve during what was expected to be a short spell in the limelight. In the 1950s almost no-one took Joan Collins seriously.

She was born in England in 1933 to a prosperous middle class family. Her father was a successful theatrical agent and Joan grew up within a show business atmosphere. Her father sometimes brought famous entertainment personalities to the family home.

Joan started her career at the age of fifteen as a student at the Royal Academy Of Dramatic Art, the most prestigious drama college in the United Kingdom. A model agency came to RADA to find unknown faces for a photo shoot, and Joan was chosen. While continuing at RADA, Joan modeled both clothes and for illustrations for stories in magazines. One picture of Joan in a newspaper was seen by an talent agent who telephoned her and suggested that he should find some film work for her.

The work he obtained was small parts in small movies, but it gave Joan a modest income and some media attention. Newspapers and magazines eagerly published her photographs, presented Joan as a new show business personality and made extravagant claims on her behalf. On winning the role of a juvenile delinquent in "I Believe In You", Joan left RADA. The Rank Organisation then took an interest in Joan and gave her a contract.

Rank set about moulding Joan into their idea of a well-groomed film star. They demanded that she make numerous personal appearances, sometimes at very humble events, to ensure that she became familiar to prospective audiences. They insisted that Joan should never appear in public looking less than elegant, and they entrusted her to Cornel Lucas, their top stills photographer. Lucas, who was married to Belinda Lee at the time, produced the first really glamorous photographs of Joan, some of which have survived. The Rank Organisation also cast Joan in a succession of very undistinguished movies in which she often played "bad girls". These films have not survived, nor do they deserve to: they do not appear on television and only one has been issued on DVD.

Had Joan stayed at Rank, it is probable her career would have run out of steam quickly; but she was lucky. Rank was willing to loan her out. Howard Hawks was making "Land Of The Pharaohs" in Rome and he decided to replace his leading lady. Joan was in Europe, inexpensive and available. Hawks gave Rank some money and Joan the star role. At a stroke, she moved several rungs up the ladder.

In his later years Howard Hawks criticised "Land Of The Pharaohs" and sometimes requested that it be excluded from retrospective "seasons" of his movies at film festivals. In fact "Land Of The Pharaohs" is far better than he realised, although certainly not a typical Howard Hawks movie. Visually it is a very handsome production. The various strands of intrigue, ambition and egotism keep the story interesting, and the ending has great impact. Joan played the scheming, unscrupulous Princess Nellifer who becomes the second wife of Khufu and plots to inherit his wealth. It was the kind of role that people notice, and one person who noticed Joan was Darryl F. Zanuck.

In the mid-1950s Darryl F. Zanuck was still head of 20th Century Fox. He was aware that television was eating into Hollywood's traditional cinema audience, and Fox was experimenting with Cinemascope and stereophonic sound to counter the threat. As were other Hollywood studios, Fox was also cautiously experimenting with story material denied to television: sex and violence; racism and social realism. However although Zanuck recognised the threat from television, he believed that as long as 20th Century Fox behaved more ruthlessly and less loyally with employees, and gave cinema audiences an experience unobtainable from television, it would still be business as usual. It did not occur to Zanuck that casually giving movie contracts to pretty girls was no longer viable. 20th Century Fox gave Joan Collins a contract and brought her out to Hollywood.

On arriving in California Joan was immediately placed on a treadmill of endless interviews and photography sessions. Her pin-up poses were fairly modest compared with those of Jayne Mansfield and Anita Ekberg, and Joan also avoided the silly "provocative" facial expressions that Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell went in for. Her glamour portraits from the late 1950s show that while Joan had an exceptionally well shaped face, at that time it lacked character and was rather bland. Joan's face became far more interesting as she grew older.

20th Century Fox cast Joan in a wide variety of movies, most of which failed to fulfill their potential. For example, her second Fox movie, "The Girl In The Red Velvet Swing" could have been a torrid melodrama of sex and murder about a licentious man corrupting an innocent girl who discovers she has a taste for sex and intrigue. Instead the movie is insipid and lacking in tension, and Joan's character is not defined at all. In 1957, the same year that Fox produced "Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison" a film about a nun alone on an island with a man, Joan was cast in "Sea Wife" a Fox movie about a nun on an island with a man! (The contest was uneven. "Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison" starred Robert Mitchum and was directed by John Huston. "Sea Wife" starred Richard Burton and was directed by a beginner.) "Island In The Sun" was another misfire: a movie dabbling in miscegenation in Jamaica without getting to grips with the issues involved. "The Bravados" was considerably better, a grim Western involving rape and murder, revenge and redemption, although it too could have been more tense and the ending more moving.

Although many of the films Joan made were forgettable, her personal publicity made a strong impression. Quickly she developed a reputation for being adventurous and gamesome in her private life. In those days most gossip magazines were still cautious about describing the precise details of movie stars' romantic liaisons, and they contented themselves with telling their readers whom Joan was consorting with. Within the movie industry however, behind closed doors and in hushed tones, there was considerable whispering about Joan's love life, and she was given the soubriquet "The British Open".  (Joan discusses this in her two autobiographies and makes interesting observations on Hollywood's hypocrisy about actresses and sex in the 1950s. In particular she refers to a double standard which accepted actresses who came to a romantic arrangement with studio bosses to obtain work, but which disapproved of actresses who indulged in similar activities for enjoyment, not career advancement. Joan emphasises in both her autobiographies that she spurned the "casting-couch" route to stardom and that she confined herself to one relationship at a time.)

At the end of the 1950s Joan's work schedule slackened, partly because Fox did not offer her many projects and partly because she turned down several films. Joan claims Fox frequently put her on suspension. She now acquired a secondary reputation for being very particular in her choices. (During her relationship with the young, unknown Warren Beatty, one fan magazine set a high value on his future appeal to women film-goers because the "choosy Joan Collins" had decided to marry him.)

Joan's last film for 20th Century Fox was "Esther And The King", produced and directed in Rome by the legendary Raoul Walsh. Today the film is much despised, not least by Joan herself, but there are points of interest for undemanding audiences. The movie is lushly lit by Mario Bava, soon to make a cult for himself as director of sexually charged horror movies, and his camera drools lasciviously over the several voluptuous and scantily dressed young actresses in the movie. Strangely, the one actress modestly dressed throughout is Joan, and the camera does not linger over her pornographically. Joan plays Esther who is dragged from her wedding by soldiers and taken, along with several other virgins, to be offered to the King as a possible new wife. He, languid and bored, delays making a decision! However in the palace corridors he sees Esther and, unaware that she is already available to him, decides he must have her.

When 20th Century Fox ran into major financial difficulties with "Cleopatra", their first defence was to postpone all new film production. Later, in desperation, they rid themselves of as many of their contract artistes as possible, and Joan's period with them came to an end. She was now at liberty to accept outside offers, but for two years she made no films.

In 1962 Joan returned to England, and appeared opposite Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in "The Road To Hong Kong", a misconceived movie that did not improve her status as a "freelance" star. While in England Joan met and married Anthony Newley, had two children by him, and her career effectively went into hibernation.

Her publicity reflected her new situation. No longer did Joan pose for conventional glamour photographs, still less for pin-up pictures. She was often photographed in soignée poses, holding a cigarette in a manner normally associated with Nöel Coward, frequently against a backdrop of expensive furnishings and ornaments within a large upper middle-class drawing room. This new image of Joan Collins, elegant and sophisticated, indicated that a phase in her career had come to an end. Joan Collins was a pin-up no more.

Not, however, because of any decline in her looks, but through choice.  As was shown in the 1971 film "Revenge", Joan kept her figure splendidly while her face became even better with maturity. So much so that when, during this first serious lull in her career, Joan was interviewed by a journal which normally adopted a supercilious attitude towards film actresses, her interviewer was thrown out of his stride. Fully intending to write in his usual condescending manner, when he was faced with Joan Collins, honesty got the better of him. Through gritted teeth and with reluctance dripping from every word, he opened his essay: "As a beauty, she does not disappoint".

                                          ACTRESSES                   HOME