Joan Collins The name alone conjures a specific image. Shoulder pads, sharp cheekbones, and an absolute command of every room she entered as Alexis Colby on Dynasty. At her peak, she was one of the most watched women on the planet. A symbol of glamour so total, it seemed almost willed into existence by sheer force of personality.
But behind that image were three marriages that most people have never looked at closely. Three relationships that ranged from traumatic to heartbreaking to quietly devastating in ways that Dynasty’s scriptwriters could never have imagined. And that Joan herself has only spoken about fully in the last decade of her life.
This is not a story about a glamorous woman making glamorous mistakes. It’s something considerably more complicated than that. To understand it, we need to start at the beginning. With the 17-year-old girl, newly signed to a film studio, who had absolutely no idea what she was walking into. Segment five. Who she was before.
Joan Henrietta Collins was born on May 23rd, 1933 in Paddington, London to a father who was a successful talent agent. His clients eventually included Tom Jones and The Beatles. And a mother who had been a nightclub dancer. She grew up in a household that was theatrical by nature. Surrounded by the vocabulary of show business before she had any real understanding of what that world actually demanded of the people inside it.
Her father Joe Collins was a self-made man who moved through the entertainment world with an easy confidence that his eldest daughter would eventually inherit. Her younger sister Jackie would go on to become one of the best-selling novelists in the world. Known for glamorous, sharp-edged stories about power and desire.
Stories that drew very explicitly on the world both sisters had grown up observing from close range. Looking back it’s easy to see how both were shaped by the same household. One who filtered the drama through fiction and one who lived it. Joan was beautiful from childhood in the particular way that brought attention she hadn’t asked for.
Her mother reportedly hung a sign on her pram warning strangers not to kiss her when she was a baby. That detail has a funny quality to it. But there’s something else in it, too. An early signal that her appearance was going to be something other people felt entitled to respond to whether she invited it or not.
That dynamic would follow her throughout her life and most intensely into her early adult years. During the Second World War the Collins family sheltered in the London Underground alongside thousands of other Londoners while German bombs fell on the city. Joan was a child through the Blitz. And that experience, the shelters, the sirens, the abrupt closures of normal life gave her generation a particular relationship to disruption and survival that people who grew up in peace find difficult to fully appreciate.
Things ended. People disappeared. You kept going. The matter-of-factness that Joan Collins has always brought to even the most difficult parts of her own history has its roots probably somewhere in those years. By her mid-teens, she was performing in amateur productions. And the passion for it was serious enough that she eventually won a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
She trained. She worked. And by the time she was 17, she had signed to the Rank Organization. One of Britain’s most significant film production and distribution companies of the era. She was making small appearances in films building the early architecture of a professional career. And beginning to understand that her looks gave her a particular kind of power in an industry that was paying close attention.
She was also, by her own later account, deeply innocent about men and about sex in a way that was entirely typical for a well-brought-up girl of her generation and entirely dangerous for someone in her position. She had not had a boyfriend in any real sense. She knew almost nothing about what the world of older men in the film industry was actually like beneath its polished surface.
She has said in interviews that she was, at 17 the equivalent mentally of a 12-year-old in terms of knowledge about sex and relationships. That the world she came from simply did not prepare young women for what they might encounter. She was at the Rank Organization. Which meant she was surrounded by ambitious, experienced professionals in an industry where young women were frequently treated as assets rather than as people.
She was 17. Which is to say she was both old enough to be treated as an adult in professional settings and young enough to be completely unprepared for what that treatment could mean. She had, in those early months at Rank, appeared in small parts and was building the foundations of what would become a long career.
She was earning the right to be taken seriously. She had no reason to think that being taken seriously and being protected were two different things. She was about to find out that they very much were. What came first was a man named Maxwell Reed. Segment four. Maxwell Reed. Marriage as obligation. Maxwell Reed was, in 1950, the kind of man who made 17-year-old girls feel very lucky to be noticed.
He was 31. Which is to say 14 years Joan’s senior. Not an enormous gap when both people are adults. But a very significant one when one of them is a teenager and the other is a well-known actor with a practiced ease around women. He was Northern Irish, born in Larne in 1919. Dark-haired with the carefully constructed magnetism of a man who had worked out early that his looks were useful and had used them accordingly.
He had served in the RAF during the war and in the Merchant Navy. And then reinvented himself as an actor through the Company of Youth program at Rank. He was a matinee idol in the British cinema of the late 1940s. The kind of face that appeared on magazine covers and drew admiring letters from female fans. He had been promoted to leading man status quite young.
Made a number of films for Rank including Daybreak, Night Beat, and There Is Another Son. And built a reputation as a screen presence with a brooding, dangerous quality that translated well to certain kinds of roles. He had also, though Joan had no way of knowing this been involved with a number of women in ways that his colleagues were aware of and that had not reflected well on him.
When Reed asked Joan out, she went. She was a young actress newly signed to Rank. He was a famous star from the same studio. It seemed, by the social logic of the time, like an obvious and flattering connection. In the world that young actresses occupied in early 1950s Britain being noticed by a man of Reed’s standing was the kind of thing that happened to people on their way up.
On their first date, he took her to his apartment. He gave her a drink. Rum and Coke. And what happened next was something she would not speak about publicly for decades. The drink had been tampered with. She lost consciousness and woke up to find that he had assaulted her. She was 17 years old and, by her own account, had never been with a man before.
In the 2022 BBC documentary This Is Joan Collins she described what had been done to her in terms that were both careful and clear. In the language of her mother’s generation, she explained it would have been called being taken advantage of. In the language of today, it was what it was. She was a teenager.
She was a virgin. And what was done to her was done without her knowledge or consent. What happened in the weeks after is almost more difficult to understand than the assault itself. Until you place it in the exact social and moral context of early 1950s Britain. Joan Collins continued to see Maxwell Reed. Not because she wanted to.
Not because she felt anything for him. But because, as she has explained many times since she felt that what had happened however it had happened had changed something about her. She had grown up in a world where a girl who was no longer a virgin had, by the conventions of the time an obligation to the man who had changed that status.
The guilt she carried was not about anything she had done. But guilt in that era and in that cultural framework did not require fault. It required only an outcome. She has spoken about this particular logic with a directness that is both matter-of-fact and quietly devastating. She hated him. She has said. She hated him.
And she felt bound to him. And those two things existed at the same time without canceling each other out. She has also made clear that she was not in a position at 17 to know what resources she might have had or to believe that anyone would have understood or to trust that the story she would have had to tell could be told without destroying her entirely.
They married in May 1952 at Caxton Hall Register Office in London. She was 18. He was 33. The wedding photographs show her in a long-sleeved gown, composed and beautiful, giving nothing away. The marriage was, by every account, as unhappy as the circumstances of its beginning predicted it would be. Reed was controlling and difficult at home.
His film career was beginning to decline in Britain and he moved them to Hollywood, where it continued to decline in a different city. The money that had seemed comfortable began to feel less certain. The life in California that was meant to be a fresh start was smaller and more constrained than either of them had imagined.
And the constraints fell predominantly on Joan. There was also something worse. At some point during the marriage, Reed suggested and then pressed that Joan should sleep with a wealthy older man for money. She has described the intended partner as an Arab sheikh and the proposed sum as a significant one. This was not framed as a suggestion, but as something he expected her to comply with.
She refused. She went home to her mother. The marriage ended formally in divorce in 1956 after 4 years. Joan was 22. Reed subsequently filed for alimony on the grounds that he had earned very little in the previous 12 months. A claim that drew attention to the disparity between what the two of them had become professionally and then eventually dropped it.
Maxwell Reed died of cancer in October 1974 at the age of 55 having had almost no contact with Joan in the preceding 18 years. She has described him as the worst of her five husbands without particular hesitation. Not with bitterness, exactly. More with the tone of someone stating an obvious fact. She left the marriage with her freedom, her career, and the beginning of a slow understanding of how the world actually worked for women in her position.
She was 22, newly famous in her own right, and would spend the next several years building herself back into someone who did not feel defined by what had happened to her at 17. That process took time. It also eventually worked because she kept showing up and kept building, which was the thing she would do over and over again for the rest of her life.
The next man she fell in love with, the one she actually chose, wanted, and admired, would turn out to be a different kind of difficulty entirely. Segment three. Anthony Newley, marriage to a genius. Between her divorce from Maxwell Reed in 1956 and her marriage to Anthony Newley in 1963, Joan Collins lived the kind of life that was interesting enough to fill several books, and she eventually wrote several.
She moved freely between London and Hollywood, dated widely, was briefly engaged to Warren Beatty before that ended over his infidelity, and established herself as a working actress with genuine range and a growing public profile. She had roles in films that pushed against the sweet ingenue typecasting she had initially been given, films that suggested she could carry darkness and complexity on screen in ways that would eventually make Dynasty feel like the role she had always been building toward. She was not naive when
she met Anthony Newley. She was a 30-year-old woman who had been through one extremely difficult marriage, survived it, rebuilt her life, and arrived at the beginning of the 1960s with a clear-eyed understanding of how men could disappoint you. None of that prepared her for Anthony Newley. He was born in Hackney, East London, on September 24th, 1931, the illegitimate son of a single mother who raised him largely alone.
His father was absent from his life. He had left school at 14 and, through a combination of remarkable natural talent and relentless drive, had become, by his early 30s, one of the most celebrated entertainers in Britain and one of the most talked-about figures in American show business. He was an actor, a singer, a songwriter, a stage performer, a comedian, and a wit of the first order.
He had scored a dozen UK chart hits, including two number ones. He had written, with his creative partner Leslie Bricusse, the music for some of the most memorable songs of the era, including What Kind of Fool Am I, which won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year in 1963, sung by Sammy Davis Jr., and Feeling Good, which would become an enduring classic associated most powerfully with Nina Simone.
His Broadway show Stop the World, I Want to Get Off, which he had co-written, directed, and starred in, had made him an international star. The songwriter, the showman, the self-invented working-class kid who had willed himself into a household name. It was an extraordinary story. He was also, by virtually every account from people who knew him, charming in a way that was almost impossible to resist, charismatic, funny, deeply emotional, capable of great warmth, and very aware of all of these qualities in himself.
He was the kind of man who made a room arrange itself around him. He also had a hunger for attention and excitement that extended, as it became clear over time, well beyond what a marriage could contain. Joan was captivated. She has described him as a genius, and she appears to have meant it without qualification.
They married on May 27th, 1963, and settled into a life in Los Angeles in a house on Summit Drive in Beverly Hills. They had two children, a daughter, Tara Cynara Newley, born October 12th, 1963, and a son, Alexander Anthony Newley, known as Sacha, born September 8th, 1965. By most accounts, the first years of the marriage were genuinely good.
Newley was at the height of his powers professionally, and the household on Summit Drive was one of the social centers of the entertainment world. Parties that brought together the most interesting and celebrated people of the decade, music around the piano, conversation that crackled with wit and ideas. Joan has described those early years in terms that make clear she was genuinely happy in them, and that the happiness was not constructed or performed.
But Anthony Newley had a quality that became clearer over time, a restless, consuming appetite for excitement and novelty that extended to women, specifically to young women, a preference he did not particularly try to conceal. Joan would describe him later as a serial womanizer, and the evidence she was given was impossible to miss.
She has spoken about a birthday party they threw for him at their home, where Barbra Streisand was among the guests, and where Streisand sang to Newley in a way that, looking back, made the nature of their connection obvious to anyone paying attention. Joan did not know at the time that an affair between them was either already underway or about to begin. She found out later.
Streisand herself would confirm the relationship decades afterward in her 2023 memoir, describing Newley as a man whose charisma drew women to him naturally and repeatedly. The Streisand affair was one among many. Newley was not discreet, and, more to the point, he did not seem to feel particularly apologetic about his behavior.
He found younger women irresistible. That much was clear to Joan and eventually to their children as well. He explained himself through his work more than through conversation or contrition, which meant that the clearest account of his infidelities came not from any private conversation, but from a public film.
In 1969, Newley wrote, directed, and starred in a film called Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? An X-rated autobiographical musical that was, in the most direct possible way, a public account of his affairs. The character at the center of the film was an internationally known entertainer who recounts his various sexual adventures, including a relationship with a figure named Mercy Humppe.
Joan appeared in the film as his on-screen wife. Their real children, Tara and Sasha, also appeared. Joan has described watching the private screening of the finished film and understanding, in a way that could no longer be argued away, exactly what her marriage had been and what her husband thought of the women in his life.
The film was a critical and commercial catastrophe. The New York Times called it an act of professional suicide. It essentially destroyed Newley’s mainstream film career in the United States. But for Joan, the damage was different in kind. It was personal. It was public. And it was impossible to recover from within the marriage.
They separated in 1970. The divorce was finalized on August 13th, 1971. Joan was 37 years old. Tara was seven. Sasha was five. Joan has described the period immediately after the marriage ended as one of the lonelier passages of her life. Not because she mourned the relationship, but because she was a single mother of two young children in a city that had watched her marriage fall apart in a very public way, in a film that had been reviewed in every major newspaper.
And she had to decide what to do next with a career that had stalled and a personal life that had just sustained another serious blow. She has said she did not leave the marriage feeling hatred. What she felt was something more like sadness. The particular sadness of having loved someone genuinely and found that the love was real, but not sufficient.
Newley’s talent was not in question. His creative gifts were extraordinary and she never disputed that. But living inside the wreckage of his self-regard was not a life she was willing to continue. And the Merkin film had made the terms of the marriage clear in a way that left no room for reinterpretation. Their two children carry both of them in different ways.
Tara became a writer and broadcaster. Sasha became a visual artist of genuine distinction. Both have spoken publicly about their father in terms that reflect the complexity of growing up with a man who was simultaneously remarkable and self-destructive. Anthony Newley married twice more after Joan and spent his later years largely in decline professionally and personally.
His attempt to return to Broadway in 1983 with a musical about Charlie Chaplin failed badly, losing $4 million. His personal life remained complicated. He died of renal cancer on April 14th, 1999 at the age of 67, having moved back in with his elderly mother in Esher, Surrey in his final months. The end of a life that had burned very brightly and then, over many years, burned down.
The third marriage began almost immediately after the second ended. It began in the form of a man who pursued Joan so persistently and so warmly that resistance eventually became impossible. Segment two. Ron Kass, marriage in crisis. Ron Kass was an American businessman who had been, in the late 1960s, one of the most important figures in the British music industry.
Born in Philadelphia in 1935 as Ronald Stanley Kashinoff, his family had changed the name to Kass when they moved to California. He had studied accounting at UCLA, married young, and worked his way up through a series of recording companies, Liberty Records, MGM, Warner Brothers, before being brought to London to head a remarkable new venture, Apple Records, the label founded by the Beatles in 1968.
Apple Records, in the period when Kass ran it, was one of the most creatively successful labels in the world. The roster included not just the Beatles themselves, but also James Taylor, Mary Hopkin, and Badfinger. The commercial division of Apple was a genuine success under Kass in a way that the broader Apple Corps organization, which was losing extraordinary sums of money across its various other ventures, from a boutique on Baker Street to a film production company, was not.
He was respected professionally and liked personally. He was also, as Joan would discover, a man capable of a sustained and genuine warmth toward the people he cared about. He had first met Joan before her divorce from Newley was finalized and had made clear his feelings in a sustained and serious way. He wrote letters. He called.
He proposed multiple times over the course of a year. Joan has described being bombarded with love, attention, and proposals and being gradually and completely worn down by the sincerity of the campaign. After the experience of Newley’s serial infidelities and the cold humiliation of the Merkin film, a man who simply and persistently wanted her, who was not distracted by his own legend, who was not rewriting the terms of the relationship every few months, was something she had not recently experienced.
They married on March 11th, 1972. Joan was 6 months pregnant at the ceremony. Their daughter, Katiana Kennedy Kass, known as Katie, was born on June 20th, 1972. Joan has described the years immediately following as among the happiest of her life. She was 39 with a new baby, a loving husband, and what appeared to be a stable and affectionate marriage.
The chaos and humiliation of the Newley years seemed genuinely behind her. She and Ron collaborated creatively as well as personally. He produced two of her films in the late 1970s, The Stud, 1978, and The 1979. Both based on novels by her sister, Jackie Collins, both of which were commercially successful and revived Joan’s film career at a moment when it had seemed to be stalling.
The first serious problem arrived from outside the marriage and from forces neither of them had control over. In 1969, before he and Joan had even married, Allen Klein had been brought in by John Lennon to take control of the Beatles’ business affairs. Klein was a formidable operator with a reputation for clearing out existing management when he arrived anywhere.
He viewed Kass as a potential obstacle and moved to remove him. The departure was sudden. For a man who had built something genuinely impressive and been pushed out through politics rather than failure, it was a professional wound that did not heal cleanly. After leaving Apple, Kass moved them to Los Angeles, where he attempted to establish himself as a film producer.
There were successes. The Optimists, in 1973, Naked Yoga, in 1974, which received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Short Subject. But the consistent momentum of the Apple years was difficult to rebuild. The entertainment industry in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s was a different kind of landscape from the British music industry he had mastered.
And the footing was less certain. Business ventures that looked promising fell through. The financial landscape of the household shifted in ways that were hard to see until the cumulative change was very large. At some point during this period, Kass began using drugs. Joan has been specific about what this looked like from the inside.
A husband who became uncommunicative, emotionally distant, increasingly unreliable with money. She went to marriage counselors, to specialists, to psychiatrists. She has described trying everything available to address what was happening and nothing working. The man who had pursued her so warmly and so persistently had gradually become someone she could barely reach.
Then, in 1980, something happened that overshadowed everything else. Katie, their daughter, was 8 years old and was struck by a car near their home in Los Angeles. The injuries were catastrophic. Serious brain trauma, a coma, an outcome that the doctors initially described as likely fatal. Joan has described being told that her daughter was going to die and what that announcement felt like as a physical thing, as though the world had been rearranged around her.
She remained at the hospital, at Katie’s bedside, through those weeks with a focus that she has described as total. Everything else in her life became secondary, including the marriage, including her career, including everything. Katie survived. She recovered slowly and over a long period, eventually returning to something close to full health.
Joan has said many times that the accident and its aftermath was the worst thing she had ever experienced. The threshold event of her entire life. It was also, painfully, a crisis she navigated largely without the emotional support of her husband, whose drug use had by that point become severe enough to render him absent in the ways that mattered most.
By the early 1980s, the family’s financial situation had become serious. They had moved through a series of progressively smaller houses as money contracted. It was in this period that Joan began to understand the full extent of what had happened to their finances. Ron had, at various points, forged her signature on documents to obtain money.
The extent of the deception, when she finally saw it clearly, was difficult to absorb. Not just because of the money itself, but because of what it said about how far things had deteriorated while she had been trying, from her end, to hold the marriage together. Dynasty arrived in 1982. It changed everything professionally for Joan, gave her the role of Alexis Colby, made her one of the most recognized women on television, and provided her with the financial stability that her personal life had been systematically dismantling.
She was nearly 50 years old, and a television show had saved her career and her independence simultaneously. She filed for divorce from Ron Kass in 1983, after 11 years of marriage. What happened afterward was complicated in its own right. Despite everything, the drugs, the financial destruction, the forgery, the years of watching a marriage collapse from the inside, Joan did not simply cut him off.
When Kass was diagnosed with cancer, she helped pay for his medical treatment. When he was dying, she flew his sons from Switzerland to be with him. She was, by accounts from those around them, present at his bedside when he died in October 1986 at the age of 51. That particular detail says something about Joan Collins that the Alexis Colby character, all revenge and calculated cruelty, entirely misses.
The woman who played television’s greatest villain was capable in private of something quite different. And the story of those three marriages, taken together, is a story about a woman who kept finding that capacity, even when the circumstances gave her every reason not to. Segment one. What three marriages left behind.
By the time Joan Collins sat down to film the BBC documentary in 2021, she was 88 years old and had been happily married for nearly 20 years to Percy Gibson, a theater producer 32 years her junior. She was a Dame of the British Empire, appointed by Queen Elizabeth II in 2015 for charitable services. She was, by every visible measure, a woman who had arrived at a version of herself that was settled and satisfied in ways that her earlier years had made no promises about.
She spoke about Maxwell Reed with the particular flatness that comes from looking back at something too extreme to sentimentalize. She was clear about what had been done to her on that first date. She was clear about the circumstances that had led her to marry a man she hated. She was clear that the guilt she had felt, the suffocating, irrational guilt of a girl who had been violated and then felt obligated, was something she would not let young women around her carry without challenging it.
She has said she hoped that hearing her story might help other women recognize that guilt is not the same thing as fault, and that the two can exist in the same moment without the guilt being deserved. The Maxwell Reed marriage was, in her own accounting, the worst of what happened to her. Not because of what came later, but because it was the first.
Because it set the template of her vulnerability at a moment when she had no defenses built yet, no experience to draw on, no version of herself that had already survived something difficult. The Reed years were the foundation everything else was built on, and they were built on sand. She spoke about Anthony Newley with something more complicated, a kind of sorrowful appreciation that had survived the wreckage of the marriage.
She still thought he was a genius. She still recognized the early years as genuinely good, and she allowed herself to say so without it sounding like an excuse for what came later. She has been consistent on this point, that a man can be genuinely talented and genuinely difficult and genuinely loved all at the same time, and that none of those things cancels the others out.
The loss of what they could have been together was something she acknowledged without pretending it didn’t exist, and without letting the acknowledgement become self-pity. Their two children, Tara and Sasha, grew up with the complicated legacy of an extraordinary father who was also an absent one in the ways that mattered most.
Tara became a writer and broadcaster. Sasha became a visual artist and portraitist of genuine distinction. Both carry their father’s talent and their mother’s resilience in a combination that speaks well for both of them. What Sasha has said publicly about his father, allegations that went considerably further than his mother was willing to go, Joan has firmly disputed.
And the dispute between siblings on that question remains unresolved. What is beyond dispute is that the family came through it together, in their various complicated ways. The Kass years she spoke about with the heaviness that comes from genuinely loving someone and watching them dissolve. She had tried. She had stayed long past the point where staying was easy, and the reason she had stayed was Katie.
Keeping the family together for a child who had nearly died and who needed whatever stability could be offered. The forgeries and the financial destruction were things she described with the tone of a woman who had processed them fully and did not need to revisit them with anger, because anger had long since been replaced by something quieter and harder to name.
Ron Kass died in October 1986, 3 years after their divorce, at the age of 51. Joan was with him. That particular detail, that she chose to be present at the end of the life of a man who had, among other things, forged her signature, spent her money, and failed her in a crisis, says something about who she actually is that no television role has ever quite captured.
Across three marriages, she had been assaulted and then felt bound to her assailant by guilt, loved a genius who could not keep faith with her, and watched a good man dismantle himself in front of her eyes. Each one had been its own kind of education. Each one had cost her something specific. Her innocence in the first, her faith in genuine love in the second, her financial security and several years of peace in the third.
What did not disappear was Joan Collins herself. The woman who had started as a teenager at a London film studio and ended up somewhere she could not have predicted and would not have chosen through the suffering, but arrived at nevertheless. She kept working through all of it. Through the Reed marriage, she kept building her career.
Through the Newley marriage, she survived a decade of humiliation without it turning her bitter. Through the Kass years and the financial ruin, she walked onto the set of Dynasty at 49 years old and gave a performance that changed the direction of her entire professional life. She has described her fifth husband, Percy Gibson, in terms that are both romantic and simply true, that he is the most honorable man she has ever met, that she learned with him how to be in a relationship in the right way, getting to know each other before
committing, which she acknowledged she had not done with any of the previous four. They met in 2000 when he was producing a play she was starring in. They married on February 17th, 2002 at Claridge’s Hotel in London in a ceremony attended by friends, including Dame Shirley Bassey and Rupert Everett. Three marriages before the age of 50.
Three completely different kinds of difficulty. And then, at 68, something that finally worked. The Alexis Colby who stalked the corridors of Dynasty was fiction, a spectacular, entertaining fiction, but fiction nonetheless. The woman who built something real out of the wreckage of three marriages and came out the other side as a Dame of the British Empire with a happy marriage and a clear sense of herself.
That version of Joan Collins is considerably more interesting. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to our channel so you never miss out on more fascinating stories.
