Joan Collins says Warren Beatty talked her into abortion
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At 90, Dame Joan Collins refuses to be part of the Silent Generation.
“I do say a lot of things that [make] a lot of my friends say, ‘You know, you can’t say that’. And I say, ‘Well, I do say it and I feel better for saying it’,” she told The Post.
The “Dynasty” icon does not shy away from saying what she really thinks about Hollywood, sexism, Ozempic and everything in between.
“Hollywood has changed a lot because it’s been taken over mostly by corporations, and corporations are the ones that are making the films now and choosing almost as if by rote,” she says, her inimitable British accent still able to cut glass.
“I don’t know how they choose the subjects to make, but there’s been very few films that I have wanted to go to. I don’t want to be lectured. I don’t want to be taught things … practically every film now has a message, and I am sick of being messaged.”
She did go to see Margot Robbie’s summer mega-hit “Barbie,” which was all about female empowerment and inclusion.
Collins’ verdict: “I thought it was OK.
“I didn’t think that the color was very good, frankly. I thought it was kind of muddy. I thought [Robbie] was great, and all the cast was great, but I wasn’t thrilled by it. I didn’t come out singing any of the songs like I did when I saw Gene Kelly or Betty Grable or Carmen Miranda,” she said.
“But then times have changed … this is what young people want today, I guess.”
What she really misses, though, are rom-coms.
“But they are very few and far between,” she said. “As for the sort of thing you’d see with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in the late ’80s or early ’90, you know, ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ or ‘You’ve Got Mail,’ forget about it. I mean, it would be lacerated, sadly, by the critics as being nothing but fluff. And everybody, it seems, wants to be lectured. And I don’t…entertainment to me is the name of the game.”
Collins grew up in a showbiz family — her father Joe was a theatrical agent — in London and arrived in Los Angeles while in her early 20s, after being sold as a studio-contract starlet to 20th Century Fox from the UK’s Rank Organization.
In her new memoir, “Behind the Shoulder Pads,” Collins details how she fought back against the sexual advances of foul and bloated film execs after being warned of Hollywood’s “wolves” by Marilyn Monroe — who was keen to particularly warn her off Daryl Zanuck, then vice-president of production at 20th Century Fox.
Days later, Collins writes, Zanuck pounced.
“Breathing cigar fumes over me, he hissed: ‘You haven’t had anyone until you’ve had me, baby. I’m the biggest and the best and I can go all night.’ I was so shocked I couldn’t speak, so I just wriggled free of his groping hands and ran back to the set.”
The star also writes of having a harrowing abortion at age 26 after becoming pregnant by her then-fiancé, Warren Beatty.
She recalls the moment she broke the news to Beatty.
“‘Pregnant?’ he asked in his puzzled little-boy voice. ‘How did that happen?'” she writes.
“‘The butler did it,’ I said sarcastically, ‘or maybe it’s an immaculate conception.’ ‘This is terrible,’ he said….’Terrible!'”
Collins makes it clear that her career would not have survived had she had her baby.
She notes that the early 1960s were “dark days for women and girls,” as abortion was practically illegal everywhere.
Fearful that she would end up in agony in a back-room clinic, Beatty accompanied her to an ex-surgeon in New Jersey.
On the morning the procedure was scheduled, Collins tried to back out of it. But 23-year-old Beatty, whose own career was just taking off, told her: “Butterfly, we can’t. We can’t do it…having a baby now will wreck both of our careers. You know it will.”
The actress says she “screamed with rage” in June 2022 when the US Supreme Court overruledRoe v. Wade, eliminating the federal constitutional right to abortion.
Collins went on to have beloved three children, Tara and Sacha Newley, with her second husband, actor and composer Anthony Newley, and Katy, with third husband, Ron Kass, as well as four grandchildren.
“It [would have been wrong for me to have had a child at the age of 25 or 26, at a time when to have a child out of wedlock was almost considered a crime,” Collins said.
“I mean, it really was. And it would’ve ruined my career. It would absolutely have ruined my career … a lot of women are made to feel guilty about it, which I think is quite shocking, and made to feel guilty about it by men, thank you very much.
“Not that I hate men. I don’t. But I do find that it’s none of their bloody business.”
Collins remains best-known for playing über-bitch Alexis Carrington Colby in “Dynasty,” the hit ’80s nighttime soap opera that made her a household name in the US at age 48.
When asked about the rise of Hollywood stars who become brands, such as Gwyneth Paltrow with her Goop business, Collins replied: “When I was doing ‘Dynasty,’ I had a million brands. I had hats. I had glasses. I still have glasses or eyewear as they call it. I still have a line of eyewear. I’ve had beauty, makeup, skincare, hats, clothes. I’ve had a million brands.
“When you’re very popular, which was when I was doing Dynasty, people will want to ask you to do things. But my brand is writing books now. As Sir Michael Caine said to me once — because I said, ‘Why are you opening a restaurant, Michael?’ — he said,’ well, no actor can rely on acting alone to support himself, and you therefore have to have another string to your bow or another thing to do’. And that was some time ago. And that’s when I decided that, yeah, I was going to write books.”
She’s now on book No. 19.
Her oeuvre includes novels, autobiographies and books on beauty.
Collins, who has been happily married to husband Percy Gibson, three decades younger, for more than 21 years, has “no truck” with the modern Hollywood must-haves Ozempic and Botox.
“Oh the thing that they inject?” she said of Ozempic. “I don’t like any ‘tweakments.'”
The actress admits she had Botox once, but ran away screaming because she’s “needle-phobic. I just believe in taking care of my skin and wearing lots of makeup.”
The star dearly misses her sister, Jackie Collins. The famous “Hollywood Wives” novelist died in 2015 at 77, following a secret battle with breast cancer. Collins admitted the two had a rift over her taking up writing, but made up before Jackie died.
“We got it out of the way,” Collins said. “And as I reminded her, when I was an actress and she wanted to be an actress, I encouraged her a lot … She did become an actress for a while, and she changed her name because she didn’t want to be known as Joan’s sister.
“And so I said, ‘Well, you know, Jackie, when you wanted to be an actress, I encouraged you. So now I’m writing because it’s a source of income for me’. And as you know, actors do not have a very good source of income all their lives, hardly at all. Very few actors are Tom Cruise or Barbara Streisand who make tons of money, you know.”
And Collins has no plans to retire; she is currently making plans to play Wallis Simpson, the late Duchess of Windsor, in the biopic “In Bed with the Duchess,” which will cover the last 15 years of the American divorcee’s life.
Said the nonagenarian: “I call myself a working actor.”
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