Joan Collins spent decades playing the most formidable woman on television, but her own early life contained experiences far darker than any script Dynasty ever produced. By her own account, she was assaulted on a date when she was 17 years old, then married her attacker out of a sense of obligation that she has spent her later years working to help other women understand. Collins was born in London in 1933 to a theatrical family. Her father was a talent agent who would later represent Tom Jones and The Beatles, and her sister Jackie would become a best-selling novelist.
She signed to the Rank Organization at 17, one of Britain’s most significant film companies of the era, and has said she was the mental equivalent of a 12-year-old regarding knowledge of sex and relationships. It was in that state that she met Maxwell Reed, a 31-year-old matinee idol who was 14 years her senior. On their first date, he gave her a rum and Coke. She has said the drink was tampered with, that she lost consciousness, and woke up to find she had been assaulted.
In the 2022 BBC documentary This Is Joan Collins, she said that in the language of her mother’s generation it would have been called being taken advantage of. She made clear she was a virgin and what was done to her was done without knowledge or consent. What followed is something she has explained many times. She continued to see Reed and married him in May 1952 at Caxton Hall Register Office in London.
She was 18. She has said she hated him but felt bound to him, a logic rooted in the conventions of an era where a girl who was no longer a virgin was believed to carry an obligation to the man who had changed that status. The marriage was as unhappy as its beginning predicted. Reed was controlling, his career declined in Britain, and then in Hollywood.
At some point during the marriage, he pressed Joan to sleep with a wealthy older man for money. She refused and went home to her mother. The divorce was finalized in 1956 after four years. Reed later filed for alimony claiming he had earned little in the previous year, before dropping the claim.
He died of cancer in 1974 at 55. Collins has called him the worst of her five husbands. Between that divorce and her second marriage, Collins rebuilt her life across London and Hollywood. She was briefly engaged to Warren Beatty before that ended over his infidelity, and established a career with genuine range.
When she met Anthony Newley, she was 30 and far from naive. Newley was born in Hackney in 1931, the illegitimate son of a single mother, left school at 14, and by his early 30s had become one of the most celebrated entertainers in Britain. He had scored a dozen UK chart hits, won a Grammy for What Kind of Fool Am I, and co-written Feeling Good. His Broadway show Stop the World, I Want to Get Off made him an international star.
Collins has called him a genius without qualification. They married in May 1963 and settled in Beverly Hills, with two children, daughter Tara in 1963 and son Alexander, known as Sacha, in 1965. The early years were genuinely good, but Newley was a serial womanizer. Collins has spoken about a birthday party where Barbra Streisand sang to him in a way that made the nature of their connection obvious.
Streisand confirmed decades later in her 2023 memoir that she had an affair with Newley. The clearest account of Newley’s behavior came from Newley himself. In 1969 he wrote, directed, and starred in Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? , an X-rated autobiographical musical that was a public account of his affairs.
Collins appeared in the film as his on-screen wife, and their real children also appeared. Watching the private screening, she understood exactly what her marriage had been. The film was a critical and commercial disaster, called an act of professional suicide by the New York Times, and destroyed Newley’s mainstream film career. They separated in 1970 and divorced in August 1971.
Collins has said she felt sadness rather than hatred, the particular sadness of having loved someone genuinely and found the love real but not sufficient. Newley died of renal cancer in 1999 at 67. Her third marriage began as the second ended. Ron Kass was an American music executive who had headed Apple Records, the label founded by the Beatles, in its most creative period.
He pursued Collins persistently, writing, calling, and proposing multiple times over a year. She has described being worn down by the sincerity of his campaign. They married in March 1972, with Collins six months pregnant. Their daughter Katiana, known as Katie, was born that June.
Collins has described the early years as among the happiest of her life. Kass produced two of her films in the late 1970s, The Stud and The Bitch, both based on novels by her sister Jackie, both commercially successful. The first serious problem came from outside the marriage. When Allen Klein took control of the Beatles’ business affairs, he viewed Kass as an obstacle and pushed him out.
The departure was sudden and professionally wounding. The family moved to Los Angeles, where Kass attempted to become a film producer with mixed success. At some point he began using drugs, becoming emotionally distant and unreliable with money. Then in 1980, Katie, age 8, was struck by a car near their home.
The injuries were catastrophic, including serious brain trauma and a coma, and doctors initially described the outcome as likely fatal. Collins has described being told her daughter was going to die as a physical thing. She remained at Katie’s bedside through those weeks with total focus. Katie survived and slowly returned to near full health.
Collins has called the accident the worst thing she has ever experienced, and she navigated it largely without her husband, whose drug use had become severe. By the early 1980s their finances had seriously deteriorated. Collins discovered that Kass had at various points forged her signature on documents to obtain money. Dynasty arrived in 1982, gave her the role of Alexis Colby and made her one of the most recognized women on television.
She filed for divorce in 1983 after 11 years. What happened after is a detail that says a great deal about Collins. 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 present at his bedside when he died in October 1986 at age 51. Collins has been happily married since 2002 to Percy Gibson, a theater producer 32 years her junior, whom she has called the most honorable man she has ever met. She was appointed Dame of the British Empire in 2015. Looking back across those three marriages, Collins has spoken with directness about what each one cost her.
Her innocence in the first, her faith in genuine love in the second, and her financial security and years of peace in the third. She has also kept working through all of it, walking onto the set of Dynasty at 49 and giving a performance that changed the direction of her professional life. The woman who played television’s greatest villain was capable in private of something quite different, and the story of those marriages is about a woman who kept finding that capacity even when the circumstances gave her every reason not to.