VJoan Collins probably had no idea how far into the future that performance would point, in which she played above all a woman from the past, a woman with a past, a person that everyone had wanted to forget. It was the performance that finally made her world famous like she had never been before, even though it was only television and she appeared in Howard Hawks and Leo McCarey, Henry Koster and Henry Hathaway feature films and thirty years earlier, after her debut in the teenage drama “I Believe in You”, had already been world-famous, at least in her native England.
It was, in 1981, the first episode of the second season of the “Denver Clans”, a series which, from the point of view of today’s series as a matter of course, was staged as simply, predictably and sluggishly as its twin “Dallas”, only a little slower. But then, in the trial of the series’ hero, an unlikely woman sat on the witness stand, beautiful, elegant, and so worldly and sophisticated that the people of Denver looked like souped-up pawn fives next to her. She was the hero’s ex-wife; and her daughter, who immediately started a fight, could not object when Joan Collins rebuked her: she had apparently had her teeth fixed. But unfortunately not her mouth.
But the news that moved audiences almost more than Joan Collins’ charisma and appeal at the time was Joan Collins’ age. She was 48 when she joined the series, she played the bad woman for eight years; and if you want to appreciate how big the sensation was at the time, you should remember that Lauren Hutton, who played the very grown-up callboy customer in the film “American Gigolo” at the same time and who was bored by her husband after many years, didn’t have one at the time was forty.
Forget the young girls
The fact that today no one would know what is supposed to be sensational about the 48 years; the beautiful experience that actresses like Juliette Binoche and Emma Thompson, Julianne Moore and Cate Blanchett well over fifty outshine their much younger colleagues in the light of the cinema: Joan Collins was not able to do all this alone. But today it seems as if she was a pioneer after all, one of the first women in the international fiction industry not to be marginalized at 45, into positions where there were only roles as aunt, mother, witch gives. She proved herself right with her performances because it was so much more interesting for both viewers to get involved with a woman who knew a little more, had experienced a little more than the young things around her .
Whether it was because of her or because of the agents, producers, screenwriters that she only became a star in her late forties, although she had already been breathtaking decades earlier, as a bad girl in “I Believe in You”, as an Egyptian princess in “I Believe in You”. “Land of the Pharaohs” or the horror films she made in the 1970s is difficult to reconstruct. Even today, a star is someone who is strong, present and recognizable enough to create an overall context for their own very different roles, an image that, the closer you look, the harder it is to distinguish from the person.
Maybe she was too stubborn for the definitions that such an image requires. Perhaps the directors weren’t quite sure who they were looking at: the classic bad girl, the cultured, slightly decadent European – or at least the English answer to the sex bombs of American and Italian cinema. Rarely has she been so miscast as Evelyn Nesbitt in The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing; the writers had Marilyn Monroe in mind when writing the screenplay.
Since the 1990s, she has proved that the bad girl suits her best, when she wrote columns for English newspapers and, as a Thatcher fan, Ukip sympathizer and Brexit supporter, was not afraid of any arguments. She turns ninety this Tuesday; one would like to wish her many restless years.
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