a ·
b ·
c ·
d ·
e ·
f ·
g ·
h ·
i ·
j ·
k ·
l ·
m ·
n ·
o ·
p ·
q ·
r ·
s ·
t ·
u ·
v ·
w ·
x ·
y ·
z ·
home
JOAN COLLINS
"Does this give you a hardon?"
The cinematic career of La Collins puts your average pot pourri to shame. From her initial promise as J Arthur Rank starlet and attendant over-promotion, via a series of frankly odd career moves, she fell not so much from grace as sideways alongside it, stopping off at all points on the way to the high camp reinvention of Dynasty and beyond. Her early career couldn't have been more incongruous. An inauspicious debut as Unnamed Beauty Contestant in the background of 1951 Launder-Gilliat comedy Lady Godiva Rides Again, upstaged by Sid James, Diana Dors, and the dulcet tones of Jimmy Young, was followed by a starring role in earnest Ealing probation drama I Believe in You as teenage tearaway Norma, torn between thug Lawrence Harvey and lovable rogue Harry Fowler. Joan went on, rather oddly, to do several more of these East End delinquent flicks, the most memorable being exploitative finger-wagger Cosh Boy, with Johnny Briggs.
The breakthrough came with two films - in the UK the shipwreck comedy Our Girl Friday, with Joan at last appropriately cast as a scantily-attired rich girl fending off the clumsy advances of co-shipwreckees George Cole, Kenneth More and Robertson 'All Gas and Gaiters' Hale - was a deserved hit. In the US, Land of the Pharoahs - a Howard Hawks ancient Egypt boreathon with Joan as a Pharaoh's wife (and, unforgettably, James Robertson Justice as the pyramid's architect) - was a deserved flop, but got her noticed, and led to a chance to go after Richard 'Dominic' Todd's Sir Walter Raleigh in The Virgin Queen, much to Queen Liz's (Bette Davis) chagrin. Stabs at seriousness, with Jayne Mansfield in Steinbeck adaptation The Wayward Bus, and with Harry Belafonte in post-colonial civil rights polemic Island in the Sun, had mixed results. Mind you, so did the other stuff - an affair with Leslie Nielsen in undernourished musical The Opposite Sex, a stab at a non-Brit accent in Gregory Peck western The Bravados, drunken acrobatics with Paul Newman in misfiring satire Rally Round the Flag, Boys! - none of this was "boffo BO".
Producers started running out of things to do with her, hence Sea Wife, an even camper retread of Our Girl Friday, with Richard Burton and Cy Grant among the male oglers this time round, and the added twist of Joan turning out to be a nun all along. After the likes of Seven Thieves, an average casino heist caper with Edward G Robinson as the mastermind of the standard gang of variously skilled misfits out to rob Monte Carlo (Joan, obviously, was the 'femme fatale' of the group) and a dabble in Italian sword and sandal epics, Joan married melodramatic crooner Anthony Newley and the films went on the back burner for a while, after a cameo in late-period Bob 'n' Bing comedy Road to Hong Kong.
"Once upon a time in the Land of Wonky..." Newley's marriage to La Collins was on the rocks by the end of the '60s, so what to do? Make a monumentally self-indulgent smutty musical in a pretentious cod-Fellini style, of course. Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? was a turning point, to say the least. Joan, cast as (cough) Polyester Poontang, sits about on a deserted beach while Newley shows a film about his life to their real-life children, and various ridiculous characters, including Milton Berle and Patricia Hayes, dance in to deliver tuneless 'bawdy' songs, like the just-quoted Princess and The Donkey (no prizes for predicting the direction that veers in). Bruce Forsyth sashays in with a showbiz number. Joan herself "sings" we-might-as-well-pack-it-in song Chalk and Cheese while a faceless Newley dry humps a Playboy model on the beach. The film dies the death. The marriage is annulled the following year. A result, of sorts. The following year's Up in the Cellar was marginally less bizarre, being a wayward student activist satire from Theodore J 'President's Analyst' Flicker, with Joan playing the wife of besieged college chief Larry Hagman, but no less a flop. Slightly firmer ground was sci-fi romance Quest for Love, with Tom Bell zapping himself into a WWII-less alternative reality, and finding himself suddenly married to Joan, with the inevitable time paradox shenanigans stitched into the love story.
Things hotted up a tad with the advent of The Horror Years. She did two fine Amicus portmanteau pics, both playing victim roles - famously under attack from a homicidal Father Christmas in Tales From the Crypt, then rather brilliantly watching her husband have an affair with a tree in Tales That Witness Madness. There was also Dark Places, in which she and Robert Hardy broke into an old house after treasure, only to find it haunted by Christopher Lee, but Hammer's Fear in the Night is probably the key text for Joan watchers. La Coll was the wife of sinister one-handed boarding school head Peter Cushing, and as such got to strut around a lot and look 'icy' in endless 'atmospheric' scenes - the first signs of that self-parodic high camp persona to come (the film's alternate title was DYNASTY of Fear! Do you see etc.?) Of course, still she kept her oar in elsewhere, with Star Trek guest spots and more Euro efforts, like Italian football/sex comedy The Refe ree, and Cry of the Wolf, the Spanish-produced Gold Rush wolf attack thriller Jack Palance doesn't like to talk about. The lady ended her horror phase with the worst of the lot, sadly, in the well-titled but otherwise useless cursed offspring potboiler I Don't Want to Be Born!
The came The Sauce, as Joan plunged headfirst into The Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones, as randy highwaywoman Black Bess, seducing Nicky Henson's eponymous lothario amidst the usual name-heavy Brit cast. It compared unfavourably to the '60s version of the same tale, to say the least, but when the only other work on offer included Alfie Darling, the Caine-less sequel with Alan Price, The Big Sleep (Michael Winner edition!) and writhing about underneath the worst papier-mache models you ever saw for Empire of the Ants, small wonder Joan took the Brent Walker shilling for that shabby time capsule of aftershave disco glamour, namely her sister Jackie's airport bonkbuster The Stud and its somewhat confused follow-up The Bitch, which we won't go into again in depth here, suffice to say that, like the best of Joan's films, they really, really shouldn't be remotely watchable, yet somehow they are. Whether that's 'star quality' or just some weird sixth sense for choosing the bizarrest projects on the trolley we can't say. Then in 1981 Aaron Spelling came knocking, and the rest is quarterback-shouldered history, and not really history we're that interested in, we have to say. The Making of a Male Model was chips-cheap Stud leftovers, and the mini-series we can take or leave. There was the awful Decadence, where she got to indulge in bondage with Steven Berkoff to make some ham-fisted point about class, but otherwise it's been one long, slick and rather dull Cosmo mag dotage. Still, for building a career via the scenic route, Joanie makes our hall of fame, like a wicked, wicked witch, and then some.
a · b · c · d · e · f · g · h · i · j · k · l · m · n · o · p · q · r · s · t · u · v · w · x · y · z · home
