Joan Collins

Princess Margaret’s grand car-boot sale at Christie’s last month reminded me of my own souvenir of PM. Several years ago I had decided to collect silver boxes, and a mutual friend asked if I would be interested in a couple belonging to her. ‘She’s having a clear-out,’ the friend explained, ‘Wants to get rid of a lot of junk. Would you be interested?’ He brought over a beautiful, and rather large, embossed square silver box for which I cheerfully coughed up £600. The following month PM had another clear-out and I bought another smaller but equally attractive box.

Los Angeles When I boarded the plane for Los Angeles in New York last Friday to attend the Vanity Fair Oscar party, as well as several others, the beautiful Uma Thurman was just ahead of me, looking every inch the star (she is, after all, 6ft tall) even though she was sans maquillage. She sweetly turned to me and said, ‘I hear you and your husband are not sitting together — I’m happy to change seats with you if it helps.’ I thanked her, and explained it was OK, because the airline had just bumped Rosie Perez so that Percy and I could sit together.

An actor’s life is either feast or famine. For 90 per cent of us too often it’s famine, as our thespian business is vastly overpopulated and competition is fierce. In the past months I’ve had more than five jobs, including a two-week stint on Footballers’ Wives, which, after almost a year of famine, felt like drinking nectar. Talk about glitzy camp! It was a hoot as the girls (and boys) are fully made up, coiffed, manicured and exquisitely dressed to kill, or kick, in the height of chav fashion. Luckily, I played a magazine mogul with stunning wardrobe so I was able to stay away from Burberry ‘Andy caps’ and sequined jeans. Zoe Lucker, who plays the chief bitch Tanya, has to wear two-and-a-half-inch nails for the whole season.

I was asked, in January, if I would have dinner with the winner of a raffle in aid of the Conservative party. I gladly agreed. Months later Percy and I turned up a polite 20 minutes late at the Drones Club, only to find a near-empty room. The only people there were two Labour MPs who were so delighted that the Tories hadn’t shown that they jokingly offered to give us dinner. An hour later the raffle winner arrived with some tipsy mates and I found myself the only woman at a table of ten. Thank goodness Percy was there for moral support. I asked Mr Lucky why he was an hour late and he replied, smirking, ‘Well, we knew you’d be late.’ ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘’Cos you’re an actress, aintcha?

A halcyon yet chilly afternoon in our house in the south of France, strolling around the garden trying to understand the gardener’s explanation for why he had ferociously slaughtered so many plants, shrubs and bushes that seemed perfectly healthy to us. Suddenly, we heard a piteous mewing from a bush outside the kitchen. The gardener reached down and grabbed a minuscule kitten by the scruff of its neck. He looked at it with some disdain and was about to chuck it back when he was stopped mid-throw by my own piteous mewing: ‘Non!

Las Vegas is America’s major playground, and the two days we spent there recently proved that. It’s a 24–7 town, unbelievably glamorous and exciting if you ignore the massively upholstered ‘middle’ Americans clad in uniform jeans and Tees who clutter the streets, then sit for hours hunched sadly over dollar slot-machines. What a mug’s game that is. We stayed at the Aladdin (soon to become the Planet Hollywood) in a spacious suite with an amazing view of the extraordinary ‘singing’ fountains of the Bellaggio Hotel, and of the ‘Eiffel Tower’, an exact replica of the original, set in the grounds of a hotel unfortunately named Paris.

I broke my toe in Minneapolis. This is far from the glamorous image of leaving my heart in San Francisco and infinitely more painful. I stubbed it on a faux Chippendale dining-room table leg during a breakfast meeting at the hotel. It was a hot autumn morning and the traffic on the freeway was gently buzzing outside when my toe lightly brushed against the raw metal end-claw of the table leg which was sticking out menacingly, and my howl of pain pierced through the almost bucolic setting. After X-raying at the local hospital, the doctor announced, ‘Yup, it’s a severe fracture of the metatarsal, involving the metatarsophalangeal joint.’ ‘What can I do?’ I wailed. ‘There’s nothing you can do with a broken toe except wait. Only time heals toes.

I feel I’ve certainly seen England from every angle in the past three months while touring in Full Circle, and it has surprised me how gorgeous the English countryside still is, and how hideous the infrastructure of some of our cities can be. In France and Italy, most towns have some sort of cohesion in their one-way systems and in the architecture of their civic and municipal buildings. By contrast, some of the English town centres seem to have been structured by saboteurs bent on uglifying them. One regularly finds a 21st-century monstrosity built out of giant glass eggshells sitting next to a classic 16th-century steepled church, which is in turn adjacent to a concrete bunker.

I’ve always considered myself a working actress and like about 98 per cent of my fellow thespians spend a great deal of time ‘resting’ involuntarily. It therefore irks when great swaths of the media refer to actors disparagingly as ‘luvvies’ and represent us as parasites and people who love swanning around and dressing up. I’ve just started rehearsing Full Circle with the nicest, most hardworking and dedicated group of people you could find, and that is how I’ve found most actors to be. Because they love working in a vastly overcrowded profession, they often get paid far too little.

I was as excited as a kid going to Disneyland to be invited on Concorde’s last flight from New York to London. I’ve always regarded it as one of Britain’s greatest ambassadors, and we considered that being a part of its final journey was too important a historic event to miss. Percy and I thus arrived at a darkened and seemingly deserted JFK airport at 6 a.m. for a 7 a.m. flight. Are we the first?, I inquired of the charming special services representative. ‘No, you’re the last,’ was the reply. ‘The party’s been going for hours.

I was sad to hear about the death of Bob Hope, although hitting 100 is a fabulous record – almost like batting 1,000. I worked with Bob several times on his television variety shows and once in a movie, Road to Hong Kong. In the four previous Road films with Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour had played the female lead but by Hong Kong she was deemed by the Hollywood hierarchy to be too old, so I was cast to play Bing's love interest at almost 40 years his junior. Bing was taciturn and grumpy through most of the movie in stark comparison with Bob, who was a bundle of laughs all shooting-day long. Reportedly, one of the last jokes he made, two weeks before he died, was on his birthday. When asked, 'How does it feel to be 100?

Channel 4 outdid itself in ignorance with the dumb, grandiosely titled The 100 Greatest Film Stars of All Time. We tuned in eagerly, expecting to see a cross-section of legendary stars from the 1920s to the present day in fabulous movie clips, and what did we get? Several dozen 'talking heads' purporting to be movie 'experts', interspersed with extremely truncated footage of some surprising stars, accompanied by scurrilous and unnecessary gossip. Granted, many of the heads did know of what they spoke.