Now in her 80th decade, Joan Collins is a triumph and the JC you seen in the chocolate bar advert is the woman you got.
She breezed on-stage ( to appreciative cheers from a 3/4 full house) shaking the well-known Collins shoulder-length locks in a pair of black, sequinned pants twinned with a classy blouson affair.
Without consulting a script she worked for almost two hours without batting a heavily mascara-filled eyelid.
Technically, it was a difficult evening which might well have daunted a younger woman, but our Joan was a match for anything and her timing when she synchronised with a large up-stage screen was admirable.
Clearly, this was a name-dropping evening and Joan had plenty to drop.
Gene Kelly was there early on. In a film sequence Kelly was required to give the Collins cheek a discreet peck. But to her consternation the full-blown kiss he delivered was the kind a lady doesn’t care to discuss. Apparently Kelly laughed it off and the Hollywood bandwagon simply moved on, casting couches and all.
Joan always managed to get out of some pretty dismal movies all the charm there was in them. But there was never an academy award nomination.
She stripped, she played a young nun somewhere else along the line, before becoming an Ancient Egyptian cutie in Land Of The Pharaohs – and almost, but not quite, taking over from Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.
Many more tedious movie-clips were flashed up of the kind you watch at 5am when you can’t sleep. Dynasty had to appear.
It was a big soap in her life – 10 years of it.
Her delivery was crystal-clear, and she told us she was RADA-trained and that theatre is in her family. But it was all done with a slightly superficial edge, as though this accomplished woman was reading a carefully-shaped autobiography, where you had to use your imagination quite a bit.
She didn’t sing, she didn’t dance – just the narrative and some audience questions at the end, of the kind which wouldn’t disturb her composure edited on stage by her husband, the patient Percy.
