Exclusive: Dame Joan Collins spills the tea on real-life feuds with ‘Dynasty’ co-stars
"I have never said anything about it before, but now the time has come."
By Will Stroude
Dame Joan Collins has opened up about her real-life feuds with her former Dynasty co-stars, admitting for the first time just how far the show’s onscreen aminosity extended off-screen.
Collins, 86, has revealed there “wasn’t a lot of love lost” between the cast of Aaron Spelling’s primetime drama, which aired for nine seasons from 1981-89 and made international stars of actors including John Forsythe and Linda Evans.
After a faltering first season which drew relatively low ratings, Dynasty’s fortunes took a turn after Collins joined the soap as scheming Alexis Carrington during its second season.
But in the Attitude Awards issue – available to download and to order globally now – Collins reveals how there was “a lot of resentment” towards her from the cast during the show’s run – and that their “antipathy” remains almost 40 years later.
“There was a lot of resentment”, she recalls. “I’ve been asked this question a million times, and when I was doing it, I would poo-poo it. I’d say, ‘Oh, no, no’.
“But yes. There was. And now I know there was because many people have come back to me who were around at that time and said, ‘They bloody hated you, Joan’.”
The London-born actress continues: “First of all, the fact that I was English, some didn’t like that. This English woman comes in and saves the show. This is what the media said, because the show was about to be cancelled.
She adds: “Even now, when we get together for Dynasty reunions as we did a few years ago, I see an antipathy towards me.
“Also, if you look at some of the things that John Forsythe, Gordon Thompson [Adam Carrington], and even Michael Nader [Dex] said about me in interviews, they were not nice.
“I have never said anything about it before, but now the time has come. Let’s call a spade a spade.”
Collins, who earlier this month was honoured with the Icon Award at the Virgin Atlantic Attitude Awards, powered by Jaguar, goes on to explain how her co-stars’ “dislike” of her was apparent from the outset – and that fellow lead John Forsythe and Linda Evans appeared to take particular issue with her.
“The first scene I did, which was me sitting in the defendant’s box in court, being interviewed by a fabulous actor called Brian Dennehy, and staring at the whole cast who were looking at me. I looked at them and I saw their dislike”, she recalls.
“I saw, sitting in the audience, John Forsythe as Blake, Linda [Evans] as Krystle, Pamela Sue Martin as Fallon. Then John James, he was playing Jeff Colby, who I felt an affinity with.
“He was the only one who gave me the vibe of, ‘I like you, Joan.’ Because I felt that the others didn’t.
“In fact, in the very first scene that Linda and I had, I had to yell at her, ‘So who do you think you are? You’re just a trumped-up little secretary who wormed her way into Blake’s life!’
“During the rehearsal, I played it down. I just said the lines, did the moves. Then when it came to actually shooting it, I saw Linda visibly shrink back from me. At the end, she said, ‘Oh my God, that was so real. Did you mean it?’
“I said, ‘Linda, it’s called acting’.
“From then on, she felt that I didn’t like her, and she didn’t like me.”
Collins, who returned to television with a recurring role on American Horro Story: Apocalypse last year, continues: “There wasn’t a lot of love lost between [many of] us, particularly John, who played Blake.
“I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the DVDs of Dynasty – John had to have his picture twice as big as anybody else, even though Linda and I were important.
“He couldn’t bear that. He had to have more lines than anybody.”
Read the full interview with Dame Joan Collins in the Attitude Awards issue, out now.
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