My moment of mortification with Saint Joan Collins

I did a film with Dame Joan Collins once. No no, not The Stud. It wasn’t as good as that. It was called The Clandestine Marriage. And although it wasn’t that fun to watch, it was really fun to make. We filmed it one autumn in someone’s stately home. I had a lovely fling with a woman in the art department, who, in order to hide the fling from friends of her faraway boyfriend, came up with the brilliant ruse of pretending to have a fling with the third assistant director to confuse everyone. At least that’s what she told me she was doing. I was definitely confused, but I believed her. It was years later that someone explained to me that she really was having a fling with the third assistant director.

But I never minded. She was so nice. And I was just so delighted to be working with Joan Collins. Charming, flirtatious, stylish, politically incorrect, iconic in her own lifetime, sharp as a proverbial pin, and enjoyably tactile. Forged during the Blitz, she’d survived being chatted up and predated on by everyone from J. Arthur Rank to Frank Sinatra. Now it was my turn.

She was very beautiful without her makeup on. I only saw that once. And I wasn’t supposed to. I was slumped in a chair on the make-up bus when Joan came in. It was 5 a.m. A candid time of day. Too early to hide. And somebody is scraping your hair back and painting out your liver spots. Gone was the smart-talking dominatrix, and in her place a pale, delicate, ironical girl. Girlish anyway. No grandeur. And disarmingly, no opinion of herself as an actress. As a star, yes, but not as an actress. Just a very famous woman of a certain age, hoping to survive the insanity of the director.