Joan Collins and Isabella Rossellini look amazing.
Collins appeared fresh on the red carpet at Cannes, where the night before she outshined younger stars by a third or quarter of her age. The 92-year-old actress brought a touch of old Hollywood glamor to a festival that, this year in particular, has often seemed strangely drained.
Her sculptural white orchid gown, custom Stephane Rolland Haute Couture shirt with sweeping train, paired with dramatic black opera gloves, diamond jewelry and studded needle-shaped pumps, gave unmistakable energy to Alexis Carrington — a reminder of the ’80s, when Collins was, well, a foxy queen. strainpractically dictating the decade’s fashion vocabulary.
“It was very exciting. I asked my beauty team to do my hair and makeup,” she says. “I looked—well, I won’t say how I looked, but you can read what they wrote.”
Lady Joan is sitting across from me now on Carlton Beach, looking a bit casual, wearing a thigh-length plaid summer dress and oversized hexagonal sunglasses the size of a tea saucer. Her famous mane was slicked into place perfectly.
Beside her, Isabella Rossellini is bohemian: wearing a loose-fitting black-and-white plaid outfit with flashes of bright orange lining, her signature bob untouched by Cannes. Rossellini traveled for this interview, and joined Collins for the discussion My duchessthe first collaboration between the two screen icons.
But Rossellini skipped the red carpet entirely.
“I actually find it very scary,” she says. “It’s a full production now. It’s not what my mother used to be [Ingrid Bergman] He went to the Oscars. “She was wearing her own jewelry, probably something special that my father bought her.”
“Well, I wore my own jewelry last night,” Collins jumped in, “because I didn’t want to be followed by a security guard. That’s what happens when they give you something to wear.”
The two women encounter each other like old friends rather than first-time co-stars, moving effortlessly between fashion, movies, and stories from another era of cinema.
“Your father and I have almost worked together,” Collins said suddenly, turning to Rossellini.
She launched into a sprawling tale about… Sea wifea 1957 drama in which she starred opposite Richard Burton. Roberto Rossellini was originally set to direct.
“Roberto got into a fight with Darryl Zanuck about my character, who was a nun, and Roberto wanted to have sex, an affair with Richard Burton’s character. He said that would be real and normal. They argued about it for a week while we were playing Scrabble in the sand. The studio wouldn’t budge and Roberto said, ‘Well, that’s not true for life,’ and he left.”
Rossellini laughs. “My father really liked you.”
Collins recently posted a photo of herself with Roberto Rossellini on Instagram on May 8, which would have been his 120th birthday.
“It’s very big on Instagram,” Rossellini says.
“Oh, you have more followers than me,” Collins replied.
But Collins is not at Cannes simply to evoke the golden age of cinema. It’s here to launch My duchess. Directed by Mike Newell (Four weddings and a funeral) From a screenplay by Louise Fennell, the film tells the story of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, a former divorced woman, King Edward VIII, later known as the Duke of Windsor, who abdicated his throne in order to marry. It focuses on the last years of her life, when she lived in France under the control of her exploitative lawyer, Susan Bloom, played by Rossellini. The film takes place after the death of the Duke of Windsor in 1972 and traces the physical and mental collapse of the Duchess under Bloom’s control.
“People thought she was dead, but she wasn’t dead. This lawyer. She was dead.” [Rossellini] He came to destroy it. She spent the last eight or nine years of her life blind, deaf, and dying. “And no one knows that.”
But the project took decades to complete. My duchess It is the first film from John Gore Studios, the new outfit launched by the Broadway director behind him Hamilton and Book of Mormonwho 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 direct a Wallis Simpson movie for 30 years. In the early 1990s, Collins met Mohamed Al-Fayed – the father of Dodi Al-Fayed, who died with Princess Diana in a car accident in Paris, and at the time was the owner of the luxury department store Harrods in London.
“I told him how impressed I was with Bales Simpson,” Collins recalls. He said: I own her house in France. So I went there.”
Bahamian-born Sidney Johnson, a former servant to the Windsor family, showed her around the house. “The place was clean, and it looked exactly the same, just like in the movie. There were two mannequins, one for the Duchess and one for the Duke. He was wearing a kilt. She was wearing Chanel, of course.”
Collins admits she feels a kinship with Simpson, who was a tabloid target in her day.
“This film is part of my comeback [at the press]“Because I faced a lot of problems in my time,” she says. “They always looked at me as the bad girl because of the roles I played. When I was in… strain“The press was saying, ‘It’s just like that,’ and I wasn’t!”
For Collins fans, My duchess It is something of a revelation. As Simpson recedes, the actress appears frail, diminished, devoid of poise and makeup. Frighteningly exposed.
“Joan has this combination that I’ve never seen before,” Rossellini says. “She’s beautiful. She has great beauty, great charm, but she has no vanity at all.”
“No, I’m not cocky. I’ve never been cocky,” Collins agrees. “I’ll open the door wearing shorts and no makeup. I don’t care.”
This lack of vanity becomes your greatest weapon My duchess. The sight of Collins – one of the glamorous figures of post-war film and television – physically withering on screen is something we have never seen before.
But there is, as Rossellini puts it, a “Joan Collins moment” in the film: when the Duchess finally explodes and attacks Bloom.
“I said the F-word once in the movie, in that scene,” Collins says with obvious glee. “While I was doing it, I thought: I’ve just told Ingrid Bergman’s daughter to do that!” “
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 between celebrity image and artistic ambition. Both have also managed to adapt to periods away from the spotlight. In an industry that often treats women as disposable, they are true survivors.
“I started in this business when I was 17,” Collins says, “and my dad said, ‘If you’re lucky, you can work until you’re 27.’” Seventy-five years later, she notes that she “probably had the longest career ever in show business.” “I’m definitely the oldest employee.”
The secret to career longevity, for her and Rossellini, was surprisingly simple, she says.
“We had good families. We never had problems with alcohol or drugs. We always wanted to work.”
The woman who spent decades playing glamorous monsters now plays a victim who is slowly erased from the world. By the end My duchessstripped of makeup, jewelry, and image, there was almost nothing left that Joan Collins’ fans thought they knew. At 92, after more than seven decades on screen, Ms. Collins may have finally found the one role that destroys the legend she spent her life creating.
