Joan Collins and Isabella Rossellini look amazing.<\/p>\n
Collins is fresh from the Cannes red carpet, where the night before she had outshone starlets a third \u2014 a quarter \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
More from The Hollywood Reporter<\/strong><\/p>\n Her sculpted white orchid gown, a custom St\u00e9phane 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 \u2014 a reminder of the 1980s, when Collins, as the scheming queen of\u00a0Dynasty, practically dictated the decade\u2019s fashion vocabulary.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was very exciting. I had my glam squad do me up, the hair, the makeup,\u201d she says. \u201cI looked \u2014 well, I won\u2019t say how I looked, but you can read what they wrote.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0My Duchess, the first collaboration between the two screen icons.<\/p>\n But Rossellini skipped the red carpet entirely.<\/p>\n \u201cI actually find it very intimidating,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s a whole production now. It\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell, I wore my own jewelry last night,\u201d Collins jumps in. \u201cBecause I didn\u2019t want a security guard following me around. Which is what happens when they give you something to wear.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cYour father and I almost worked together,\u201d Collins says suddenly, turning to Rossellini.<\/p>\n She launches into a sprawling anecdote about\u00a0Sea Wife, the 1957 drama in which she starred opposite Richard Burton. Roberto Rossellini had originally been hired to direct.<\/p>\n \u201cRoberto fought with Darryl Zanuck over my character, who was a nun, and Roberto wanted her to have sex, a relationship with Richard Burton\u2019s 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\u2019t budge and Roberto said, \u2018Well, it\u2019s not true to life,\u2019 and left.\u201d<\/p>\n Rossellini laughs. \u201cMy father really liked you.\u201d<\/p>\n Collins recently posted a photo of her with Roberto Rossellini on Instagram on May 8, which would have been his 120th birthday.<\/p>\n \u201cShe\u2019s very big on Instagram,\u201d Rossellini says.<\/p>\n \u201cOh, you have more followers than me,\u201d Collins retorts.<\/p>\n But Collins is not in Cannes simply to reminisce about the golden age of cinema. She\u2019s here to launch\u00a0My 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\u2019 physical and mental collapse under Blum\u2019s control.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople thought she had died, but she hadn\u2019t. 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.\u201d Collins has been trying to make her Wallis Simpson film for 30 years. In the early 1990s, Collins met Mohamed Al-Fayed \u2014 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI told him how fascinated I was with Wallis Simpson,\u201d Collins recalls. \u201cHe said, \u2018I own her house in France.\u2019 So I went there.\u201d<\/p>\n She was shown around the house by Bahamas-born Sydney Johnson, the Windsors\u2019 former valet. \u201cThe 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.\u201d \u201cThis film is a bit of me getting back [at the press], because I had a lot of problems in my time,\u201d she says. \u201cThey always saw me as the bad girl because of the roles I played. When I was in\u00a0Dynasty, the press would say: \u2018She\u2019s just like that,\u2019 and I wasn\u2019t!\u201d<\/p>\n For Collins\u2019 fans,\u00a0My Duchess\u00a0is something of a revelation. As Simpson declines, the actress appears frail, diminished, stripped of poise and makeup. Frighteningly exposed.<\/p>\n \u201cJoan has this combination that I have never seen before,\u201d says Rossellini. \u201cShe is beautiful, has great beauty, great glamor, but absolutely no vanity whatsoever.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNo, I am not vain. I have never been vain,\u201d Collins agrees. \u201cI\u2019ll answer the door in shorts with no makeup. I don\u2019t care.\u201d<\/p>\n That lack of vanity becomes the greatest weapon of\u00a0My Duchess. The sight of Collins \u2014 one of the defining glamour figures of post-war cinema and television \u2014 as she physically withers onscreen is something we have never seen before.<\/p>\n But there is, as Rossellini puts it, one \u201cJoan Collins moment\u201d in the film: when the Duchess finally snaps and lashes out at Blum.<\/p>\n \u201cI say the F-word one time in the film, in that scene,\u201d says Collins with obvious delight. \u201cAs I was doing it, I thought: \u2018I just told Ingrid Bergman\u2019s daughter to F-off!\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI started working in this business when I was 17, and my father told me, \u2018If you are lucky, you can work until you\u2019re 27,\u2019 \u201d says Collins. Seventy-five years later, she notes that she\u2019s had probably \u201chad the longest-ever career in show business. I\u2019m certainly the oldest working.\u201d<\/p>\n She says the secret to career longevity, both for her and Rossellini, was surprisingly simple.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had good families. We never had problems with alcohol or drugs. And we always wanted to work.\u201d Best of The Hollywood Reporter<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for THR’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 \u2014 a quarter \u2014 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2419864,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[474035,372245,349352,397186,31190,401834],"class_list":["post-2419863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-dame-collins","tag-isabella-rossellini","tag-joan-collins","tag-roberto-rossellini","tag-the-hollywood-reporter","tag-wallis-simpson"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/The-Grande-Dames-Joan-Collins-Isabella-Rossellini-Bring-Old-Hollywood.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2419863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2419863"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2419863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2419865,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2419863\/revisions\/2419865"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2419864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2419863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2419863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2419863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n
But getting the project made took decades.\u00a0My Duchess\u00a0is the first feature from John Gore Studios, the new outfit launched by the Broadway impresario behind\u00a0Hamilton\u00a0and\u00a0The Book of Mormon, who agreed to finance the project after Collins pitched it to him at a King\u2019s Trust dinner in late 2023. Embankment Films is handling sales in Cannes.<\/p>\n
Collins admits to feeling a kinship with Simpson, who was the target of the tabloids of her day.<\/p>\n<\/span><\/div>\n
The woman who spent decades playing glamorous monsters is now playing a victim slowly erased from the world. By the end of\u00a0My 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.<\/p>\n