Dame Joan Collins

"People say, 'Joan, you're so normal' And I am. Although I do give really good diva. On stage I diva it to death"

- NICK CURTIS

I won’t have a glass of wine because if I do I’ll tell you anything,” says Dame Joan Collins, settling into a quiet table at Olivio in Elizabeth Street. Even without the lubrication of alcohol this great dame, the Dynasty diva with a nine-decade acting career, proves deliciously indiscreet on subjects ranging from Brexit to the US election to her five husbands.

She’s 91 but hates being defined by it, and in her last memoir, Behind the Shoulder Pads, listed the ages of all the journalists vulgar enough to bring it up (I’m 58, Joan, for the next volume). She’s in her “uniform”, a 10-year-old Erdem dress (“I used to love him but he changed his style”), a white jacket she designed herself and a hat “bought for $10 in an American supermarket” — she has homes in LA and St Tropez as well as Belgravia. Smaller than I expected from her regal image, she has good skin, a level, green-eyed gaze, a deliciously wry smile and a quick wit.

An example. I ask her if she regrets anything and she says, “Three … no, two dreadful marriages. My first one, when I was 18 [to actor Maxwell Reed] and my last one to Peter Holm.” The pop singer and playboy was her penultimate spouse, before her current union with Percy Gibson, 32 years her junior, who she married in 2002.