Joan Collins and Isabella Rossellini look amazing.
Collins is fresh from the Cannes red carpet, where the night before she had outshone starlets a third — a quarter — her age. At 92, the actress brought a blast of old Hollywood glamour to a festival that, this year especially, has often felt strangely drained of it.
Her sculpted white orchid gown, a custom Stéphane Rolland Haute Couture number with a sweeping train, paired with dramatic black opera gloves, diamond jewelry and similarly encrusted needle-toe pumps, gave off unmistakable Alexis Carrington energy — a reminder of the 1980s, when Collins, as the scheming queen of Dynasty, practically dictated the decade’s fashion vocabulary.
“It was very exciting. I had my glam squad do me up, the hair, the makeup,” she says. “I looked — well, I won’t say how I looked, but you can read what they wrote.”
Sitting opposite me now on the Carlton Beach, Dame Joan is only slightly more casual, wearing a thigh-length patterned summer dress and oversized hexagonal sunglasses the size of tea saucers. Her famous mane is perfectly buffed into place.
Next to her, Isabella Rossellini is the bohemian counterpoint: Draped in a loose black-and-white patterned outfit with flashes of bright orange lining, her trademark pixie cut untouched by Cannes excess. Rossellini has flown in for this interview, joining Collins to discuss My Duchess, the first collaboration between the two screen icons.
But Rossellini skipped the red carpet entirely.
“I actually find it very intimidating,” she says. “It’s a whole production now. It’s not like when my mother [Ingrid Bergman] went to the Oscars. She wore her own jewelry, maybe something special that my father had bought for her.”
“Well, I wore my own jewelry last night,” Collins jumps in. “Because I didn’t want a security guard following me around. Which is what happens when they give you something to wear.”
The two women bounce off each other like old friends rather than first-time co-stars, veering effortlessly between fashion, film and stories from another era of cinema.
“Your father and I almost worked together,” Collins says suddenly, turning to Rossellini.
She launches into a sprawling anecdote about Sea Wife, the 1957 drama in which she starred opposite Richard Burton. Roberto Rossellini had originally been hired to direct.
“Roberto fought with Darryl Zanuck over my character, who was a nun, and Roberto wanted her to have sex, a relationship with Richard Burton’s character. He said that would be real, natural. They fought about it for a week while we played Scrabble in the sand. The studio wouldn’t budge and Roberto said, ‘Well, it’s not true to life,’ and left.”
Rossellini laughs. “My father really liked you.”
Collins recently posted a photo of her with Roberto Rossellini on Instagram on May 8, which would have been his 120th birthday.
“She’s very big on Instagram,” Rossellini says.
“Oh, you have more followers than me,” Collins retorts.
But Collins is not in Cannes simply to reminisce about the golden age of cinema. She’s here to launch My Duchess. Directed by Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral) from a script by Louise Fennell, the film tells the story of Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, the previously divorced woman King Edward VIII, later known as the Duke of Windsor, abdicated his throne to marry. It focuses on the final years of her life, when she lived in France under the control of her exploitative lawyer, Suzanne Blum, played by Rossellini. The film picks up after the death of the Duke of Windsor in 1972 and traces the Duchess’ physical and mental collapse under Blum’s control.
“People thought she had died, but she hadn’t. This lawyer [Rossellini] came in an destroyed her. She spent the last eight or nine years of her life blind, deaf and dying. And no one knows that.”
But getting the project made took decades. My Duchess is the first feature from John Gore Studios, the new outfit launched by the Broadway impresario behind Hamilton and The Book of Mormon, who agreed to finance the project after Collins pitched it to him at a King’s Trust dinner in late 2023. Embankment Films is handling sales in Cannes.
Collins has been trying to make her Wallis Simpson film for 30 years. In the early 1990s, Collins met Mohamed Al-Fayed — the father of Dodi Fayed, who died with Princess Diana in the Paris car crash, and, at the time, the owner of London luxury department story Harrods.
“I told him how fascinated I was with Wallis Simpson,” Collins recalls. “He said, ‘I own her house in France.’ So I went there.”
She was shown around the house by Bahamas-born Sydney Johnson, the Windsors’ former valet. “The place was immaculate, it looked just as it did, just as it does in the film. There were two mannequins, one of the Duchess and one of the Duke. He was wearing a kilt. She was wearing Chanel, of course.”
Collins admits to feeling a kinship with Simpson, who was the target of the tabloids of her day.
“This film is a bit of me getting back [at the press], because I had a lot of problems in my time,” she says. “They always saw me as the bad girl because of the roles I played. When I was in Dynasty, the press would say: ‘She’s just like that,’ and I wasn’t!”
For Collins’ fans, My Duchess is something of a revelation. As Simpson declines, the actress appears frail, diminished, stripped of poise and makeup. Frighteningly exposed.
“Joan has this combination that I have never seen before,” says Rossellini. “She is beautiful, has great beauty, great glamor, but absolutely no vanity whatsoever.”
“No, I am not vain. I have never been vain,” Collins agrees. “I’ll answer the door in shorts with no makeup. I don’t care.”
That lack of vanity becomes the greatest weapon of My Duchess. The sight of Collins — one of the defining glamour figures of post-war cinema and television — as she physically withers onscreen is something we have never seen before.
But there is, as Rossellini puts it, one “Joan Collins moment” in the film: when the Duchess finally snaps and lashes out at Blum.
“I say the F-word one time in the film, in that scene,” says Collins with obvious delight. “As I was doing it, I thought: ‘I just told Ingrid Bergman’s daughter to F-off!’ ”
Despite the darkness of the material, there is an unmistakable lightness between the two actresses, perhaps because both have spent decades navigating the strange collision of celebrity image and artistic ambition. And both have also successfully adjusted to periods out of the spotlight. In an industry that often treats women as disposable, they are true survivors.
“I started working in this business when I was 17, and my father told me, ‘If you are lucky, you can work until you’re 27,’ ” says Collins. Seventy-five years later, she notes that she’s had probably “had the longest-ever career in show business. I’m certainly the oldest working.”
She says the secret to career longevity, both for her and Rossellini, was surprisingly simple.
“We had good families. We never had problems with alcohol or drugs. And we always wanted to work.”
The woman who spent decades playing glamorous monsters is now playing a victim slowly erased from the world. By the end of My Duchess, stripped of makeup, jewelry and image, there is almost nothing left of the Joan Collins audiences think they know. At 92, after more than seven decades onscreen, Dame Collins may finally have found the one role that destroys the myth she spent a lifetime creating.
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