Dame Joan Collins Has Seen It All

For someone who has every press clipping, talk-show appearance, and magazine cover with her visage neatly archived in the basement of her London estate, Dame Joan Collins doesn’t consider herself a particularly nostalgic person.

“I don’t think I live in the past…” she recently told Vogue. “Although I do have a lot of fun anecdotes about it.”

In This Is Joan Collins, premiering this week on Turner Classic Movies, the English icon opens up like never before. Having already published six memoirs (with a seventh in the works), Collins is hardly a stranger to sharing the dishier details of her life. But while a number of production companies had approached her over the years about making a documentary, she had little interest in watching old co-stars sing her praises.

“I didn’t just want a bunch of talking heads saying ‘I sure loved making that picture with Joanie in nineteen so-and-so,’” Collins says. “How dull would that be?”

The only star in This Is Joan Collins is—appropriately—Collins herself. Making extensive use of her aforementioned archive, the documentary follows her one-of-a-kind journey from working with Bette Davis and Gregory Peck as a rising Hollywood starlet, to acting opposite killer ants as a washed-up B-movie queen, to becoming an even bigger star than before as Alexis Carrington on the ’80s mega-hit Dynasty. Narrated by Collins in peak, bitingly funny form, it’s one of the most purely entertaining celebrity documentaries in recent memory.

For audiences less familiar with Collins’s biography, This Is Joan Collins also shows just how intertwined she is with Hollywood history. Touted as everything from “Britain’s bad girl” to “England’s answer to Ava Gardener” upon her arrival in America in the 1950s, Collins was quickly signed under contract by 20th Century Fox and, at the peak of her film career, fronted big-budget titles like The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing and The Opposite Sex. Both in the documentary and in casual conversation, Collins has a way of tossing off asides that make you sit up a little straighter: “I met Joan Crawford once and she was terrifying—and not beautiful at all,” for instance, or, “When I got engaged to Warren…” as in, Beatty.