Joan Collins Opens Up About Her 20-Year Hospice Mission
Dame Joan Collins is back in the conversation at 93 with a specific purpose: promoting Shooting Star Unwrapped, a new charity podcast she recorded for Shooting Star Children's Hospices, which launched on September 15 with her episode alongside Michael Ball's. Collins appeared on ITV's This Morning with Cat Deeley and Ben Shephard this week to talk about it — and the conversation, hosted by the same show where Elizabeth Hurley had raved about her a few days earlier, covered everything from the charity's work to the time a Dynasty catfight sent her to the emergency room. The hospice connection is not a celebrity favor of the moment: Collins has been a vice-president of the charity since 2003, and Shooting Star supports children with life-limiting conditions and their families across Surrey and London. The podcast, hosted by the charity's executive vice-president Karen Sugarman, ties into a virtual auction running through December 15, for which Collins donated a Valentino clutch that was a birthday gift from the designer roughly 20 years ago.
What made the interview land was her explanation of why the cause matters to her personally. Collins described how, after her daughter was hit by a car and spent a long stretch in a coma, hospital staff told her she could take her home once the girl could breathe on her own — even though she couldn't walk or talk yet — because rehab was her family's problem to solve. Collins had the resources to bring in a full care team, and her daughter recovered completely; she used the story to point out that most parents don't have that option, which is exactly where a hospice like Shooting Star steps in, including support rooms for parents to grieve. She was blunt about why the charity needs more attention than it gets, arguing that children's hospice care is not a fashionable cause in the way breast cancer awareness is — while carefully adding that Breast Cancer Awareness Month, now underway, is hugely important too.
The Dynasty stories filled the middle of the appearance, starting with the show's most famous catfight. Collins recalled being told she'd have to do the lily-pond fall herself instead of using her double — she literally flew into the water, hat first, in a shallow pool — and that during the final struggle with Linda Evans, the director never called cut before Evans threw the scripted punch, sending Collins' head into the side of the pool and earning her a trip to A&E with a minor concussion. She also pushed back on the label that has followed Alexis Carrington for four decades: in her telling, Alexis is not a villain but a woman getting revenge on a man who banished her from her children for 16 years and killed her lover, and that is precisely why audiences rooted for her. Collins added that she barely saw the show air at the time — she'd spend six or seven months a year filming in Los Angeles and then return to England, in the pre-recording era — and it wasn't until COVID that she and her husband, Percy Gibson, watched long stretches of it together, mostly appalled by the wardrobe and the hats Aaron Spelling insisted on.
Also on the table: her friendship with Elizabeth Hurley, whose mother she played twice on The Royals, and her memories of arriving in Hollywood at 20 during its golden age, shoulder to shoulder with Ava Gardner, Humphrey Bogart and Frank Sinatra, too young to realize what she was witnessing. Of everyone she met, she said Elizabeth Taylor was the one who fully lived up to the legend — enchanting, funny, a girl's girl who'd talk clothes and gossip — and that she later played Taylor's agent in the 2001 television film These Old Broads, Taylor's final screen role before her death a decade later. Collins, who has published 19 books and says she is working on a twentieth, has plenty of material left. But the through-line of the appearance was the one she kept returning to: seven decades in front of a camera, and the current project that actually needs her is a hospice podcast and a designer handbag on the auction block.
