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COLLINS, JOAN (1933– ). British actress.
In the beginning, after starring in Esther
and the King, she was pencilled in to star in a remake of Cleopatra,
and probably would have been fine in the part; but delusions of grandeur
and a larger budget brought Elizabeth Taylor in as her replacement, with
well-documented and disastrous results. She then served as an incongruous
substitute for Dorothy Lamour as love interest for the aging Bob Hope
and Bing Crosby in their final, and science-fictional, "Road" picture,
until public displeasure belatedly brought Lamour herself into the picture
to shove her out of the limelight. Traveling to America in search of work,
this aristocratic actress then was bizarrely cast in a Star
Trek episode as a Jane Addams-like social worker in 1930s America,
feeding the poor and housing the homeless while rhapsodizing about a future
of space travel and carrying on a chaste romance with a disguised James
T. Kirk (William SHATNER); yet she was very affecting
in the part, reminding us that, for all the glitz and glamour of her celluloid
career, Collins has in real life tirelessly devoted herself to charitable
causes, even earning the Order of the British Empire for her efforts in
that area. At the same time that she excelled in Star
Trek, however, she brought absolutely no panache to her portrayal
of a villainess on Batman and did little to impress viewers
in her other television roles.
So, Collins returned to England to briefly reign as the
queen of Hammer horror in a series of second-rate films. She hit rock
bottom in the mid–1970s, posing nude for a men's magazine, taking roles
in soft-porn films, and most humiliatingly of all, starring in Bert I.
Gordon's Empire of the Ants—a sophisticated lady completely out of her element, stranded in a swamp
wearing high heels and screaming at some of the most pathetic giant insects
to ever grace a science fiction film. Yet that film represented a turning
point in Collins's career, as it was arguably her first major outing as
a beautiful middle-aged bitch-queen, the role that would finally make
her a star in the television soap opera Dynasty.
In fact, recalling that Irwin ALLEN took advantage of David HEDISON's
role in his abysmal remake of The Lost
World to re-edit the film as an episode of Voyage
to the Bottom of the Sea, one wishes that producer Aaron Spelling
had made something worthwhile out of Empire
of the Ants by purchasing and re-editing the film as an episode
of Dynasty, with scheming Alexis recruited to
help ex-husband Blake Carrington deal with the latest threat to his far-flung
empire, an invasion of giant ants.
Her fortune made after Dynasty, Collins performed on screen less
often and launched her controversial writing career, successfully portraying
a genuine author in a courtroom case involving a publishing company that
questioned her talents. Coming full circle, she most recently replaced
Elizabeth Taylor—as Fred Flintstone's mother-in-law in the sequel to
The Flintstones—and if William Shatner
really wishes to play Captain Kirk one more time, he might consider pitching
a sequel to "The City on the Edge of Forever," reuniting an elderly Kirk
with long-lost love Edith Keeler. With the still-attractive Collins as
his formidable ally, the film might actually be produced; she isn't a
woman I would ever bet against. |
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