Joan Collins

Diary – 20 May 2005

A halcyon yet chilly afternoon in our house in the south of France, strolling around the garden trying to understand the gardener’s explanation for why he had ferociously slaughtered so many plants, shrubs and bushes that seemed perfectly healthy to us. Suddenly, we heard a piteous mewing from a bush outside the kitchen. The gardener

Diary – 26 February 2005

Las Vegas is America’s major playground, and the two days we spent there recently proved that. It’s a 24–7 town, unbelievably glamorous and exciting if you ignore the massively upholstered ‘middle’ Americans clad in uniform jeans and Tees who clutter the streets, then sit for hours hunched sadly over dollar slot-machines. What a mug’s game

Diary – 13 November 2004

I broke my toe in Minneapolis. This is far from the glamorous image of leaving my heart in San Francisco and infinitely more painful. I stubbed it on a faux Chippendale dining-room table leg during a breakfast meeting at the hotel. It was a hot autumn morning and the traffic on the freeway was gently

Diary – 29 May 2004

I feel I’ve certainly seen England from every angle in the past three months while touring in Full Circle, and it has surprised me how gorgeous the English countryside still is, and how hideous the infrastructure of some of our cities can be. In France and Italy, most towns have some sort of cohesion in

Diary – 28 February 2004

I’ve always considered myself a working actress and like about 98 per cent of my fellow thespians spend a great deal of time ‘resting’ involuntarily. It therefore irks when great swaths of the media refer to actors disparagingly as ‘luvvies’ and represent us as parasites and people who love swanning around and dressing up. I’ve

Diary – 1 November 2003

I was as excited as a kid going to Disneyland to be invited on Concorde’s last flight from New York to London. I’ve always regarded it as one of Britain’s greatest ambassadors, and we considered that being a part of its final journey was too important a historic event to miss. Percy and I thus

Diary – 16 August 2003

I was sad to hear about the death of Bob Hope, although hitting 100 is a fabulous record – almost like batting 1,000. I worked with Bob several times on his television variety shows and once in a movie, Road to Hong Kong. In the four previous Road films with Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour had

Diary – 24 May 2003

Channel 4 outdid itself in ignorance with the dumb, grandiosely titled The 100 Greatest Film Stars of All Time. We tuned in eagerly, expecting to see a cross-section of legendary stars from the 1920s to the present day in fabulous movie clips, and what did we get? Several dozen ‘talking heads’ purporting to be movie