Joan Collins’ 5 Marriages: From Scandal and Heartbreak to Love With a Husband 32 Years Younger
You won't believe which star she was briefly engaged to early in her career!
Over the course of a nearly 75-year career, Joan Collins has captivated countless fans with her distinctive beauty and self-assured sass. At 92, the Dynasty star is a living legend (she even has the official title of Dame to prove it!), and over the years her personal life has proved almost as dramatic as her signature show.
Collins has been married five times, and her current marriage has been her longest and happiest one yet. Read on for a look at the Dame’s love life and what she’s said about her husbands over the years.
Joan Collins’ troubled first marriage to Maxwell Reed
In 1952, at just 19, Joan Collins married 33-year-old actor Maxwell Reed. They divorced in 1956, and decades later, she revealed that he had drugged and date-raped her when she was a 17-year-old virgin and tried to prostitute her to older men during their marriage.
Today, it’s shocking to think that a woman would marry her rapist, and the disturbingly skewed power dynamic in Collins’ first marriage is very clear, but she explained, “I come from a generation where if you’re going to have sex, you get married.” Understandably, she called him the worst of her five husbands.
Joan Collins’ ’50s and ’60s love life: From Charlie Chaplin’s son to Warren Beatty to Ryan O’Neal
After her divorce, Collins dated Sydney Chaplin, the son of Charlie Chaplin and her co-star in the 1955 film Land of the Pharaohs, and producer Arthur Loew Jr. She then had an affair with director and producer George Englund, who was married to actress Cloris Leachman.
Collins’ most significant relationship of the late ’50s was with Warren Beatty. At the time, Beatty wasn’t yet a household name, and his ladies’ man reputation hadn’t publicly come into play. Collins and Beatty got engaged, and she said they had “quite a passionate relationship,” but tension arose when Collins became pregnant and Beatty demanded she have an abortion. They broke up by the early ’60s, and Collins later said that she didn’t regret not keeping her baby and felt it was the right thing to do for her career at the time.
Collins went on to date some of the era’s biggest stars, including Ryan O’Neal, Terence Stamp, Dennis Hopper, Marlon Brando and Harry Belafonte.
Joan Collins’ second marriage to Anthony Newley—and the movie that destroyed it
Collins married her second husband, singer and actor Anthony Newley, in 1963. They had a daughter, Tara, now a journalist and TV and radio personality, and a son, Alexander, now an artist.
In 1969, Newley wrote, directed and starred in the bizarrely titled musical film Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? and cast Collins as his love interest, a woman named Polyester Poontang (yes, you read that correctly!) The actress was none too pleased with the movie, and said the way the film reflected his real-life womanizing ways contributed to her decision to divorce him. As she explained, “Husband number two was wonderful . . . He was fabulous, until he went off to make a movie about his life in which he went to bed with about 72 women.”
Collins and Newley’s son later alleged that Newley was a pedophile (and cited the film as evidence, due to his character having an affair with a teenage girl), but the actress and her daughter strongly denied these claims.
Joan Collins’ third husband, Ron Kass: From working with the Beatles to producing her camp classics
Collins married Ron Kass, a businessman, music executive and film producer, in 1972, and they had a daughter, Katyana, that year. Kass had previously been the head of the Beatles’ record label, Apple, and he and Collins collaborated creatively when he produced two of her campy late-’70s films, The Stud (1978) and The Bitch (1979).
In the wake of his firing from Apple, Kass became a drug addict, and the marriage was tested even more in 1980, when their 8-year-old daughter was hit by a car and nearly died. Thankfully, Katyana recovered, but the combination of the accident and Kass’ worsening addiction and financial irresponsibility ultimately led them to divorce in 1983.
As Collins said in her 2013 memoir, Passion for Life, “My intelligent and ambitious husband had ruined his life, and almost ruined mine. Time for divorce number three.”
Why Joan Collins’ ‘Dynasty’-era fourth marriage to Peter Holm lasted just one year
In 1985, Dynasty was at the peak of its popularity, and Collins, then in her 50s, was getting the most recognition of her career. That year, she married singer Peter Holm. The relationship quickly soured, and by 1986, she attempted to have the marriage annulled.
Collins said that Holm was physically abusive and got a restraining order against him. Their divorce was finalized in 1987, and the proceedings were covered breathlessly by the tabloids of the day. Things got particularly chaotic when Holm started protesting outside her house while holding up signs alleging that Collins had left him broke and homeless.
Looking back at her fourth marriage in her memoir, Collins likened Holm to a handsome but devious con man, and quipped, “The divorce proceedings in 1987 were so dramatic that they made Dynasty look like Little House On The Prairie.”
How Joan Collins found happiness with her fifth husband, Percy Gibson
Joan Collins has been happily married to her fifth husband, Percy Gibson, since 2002. At 23 years, it’s her longest marriage by far.
Collins met Gibson when she was starring in a play he produced, and she initially thought that she was done with marriage for good, but soon realized he was, “kind, true, nice, funny, intelligent . . . the most honorable man I’ve ever met,” and decided her no-marriage rule was worth breaking.
Gibson is 32 years younger than Collins, which led some to speculate that their relationship wouldn’t last, but she reasoned, “Everybody knows how happy we are together. And, you know, age is—as far as we’re concerned—just a number, and that’s the way that we both feel. Obviously, we talked about it before we got married, but it isn’t in the slightest importance.”
Clearly, the fifth time has been the charm for the legendary actress, and in a 2022 interview with Woman’s World’s print magazine, Collins said, “I’ve finally found the love of my life now, and though I don’t know if I’m an expert in keeping the romance alive in a marriage, I do think one thing you must do is have a friendship with your partner. And when you’re wrong, always admit it. You can have a few fights now and again, but I’ve learned it’s important to just love each other first and foremost.”
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