I couldn’t help but share these amazing images of Joan Collins, in what is definitely the best era of her style. Interview text is underneath the images.

Photographer is uncredited.

Scanned from Photoplay, July 1972.

JOAN COLLINS AND HER SECRET WEDDING

Joan Collins is now Mrs. Ron Kass. The American music producer became Joan’s third husband in a wedding, kept secret by the couple, which took place in Ocho Rios in Jamaica some weeks ago.

Why such a quiet wedding?

“We didn’t want a lot of people mak-ing a fuss, so no one was there except for the hotel staff,” explained Joan. “We all drank champagne and afterwards they all left. It was marvellous. Then we went walking on the beach.”

Joan however, did make one telephone call to announce the marriage. She rang her daughter Tara and son Sacha in London.

“I talked to Tara and she said she was very happy,” said Joan. “Sacha was watching television, but Tara said she would tell him. It’s terribly difficult talking to children long-distance on the telephone.”

The children’s father is Anthony Newley, Joan’s former husband. Her first husband was Maxwell Reed, whom she divorced back in the Fifties.

Ron Kass has been a close friend of hers for over two years. Joan admitted that she and Ron had been planning to marry for a long time. “But there were complications,” she added. “He had to wait for his divorce. And we were in no hurry.” Ron Kass has three sons by his first wife. They live with their mother.

It seems hard to believe that Joan started making movies twenty years ago. She made her debut in I Believe In You back in 1952.

Shortly after her marriage to Ron Kass, she was in New York helping to publicise one of her latest movies, Tales From The Crypt, her first horror movie. In one of the film’s five episodes, narrated by Sir Ralph Richardson, she plays a woman who has just murdered her husband in their own home and while
she’s disposing of the body, a homicidal man-iac comes rapping at the window.

“It seems dreadful to say I’ve done a ‘horror’ film. It sounds like one of those things where one woman sinks her teeth into another’s breast. But it isn’t like that at all,” she told writer David Dugas. “It is frightening, though. I saw a bit of it and it scared the hell out of me.”

In the past two years, Joan has worked busily on several movie projects which have included Revenge, Quest For Love, Fear In The Night and Tales From The Crypt.

“I’ve worked a lot lately, but I’m going to take it easy for a while,” she smiled. “I’d just like to be a wife for a bit.”

She lives in a splendid house in Highgate, near London which she has decorated. She and Ron have also furnished a holiday house at Marbella on Spain’s south coast. She has sold her house in Hollywood.

“I lived in Hollywood for quite a while and the worst part was that it was so far away from everywhere else I wanted to go — Switzerland, France, Italy, Germany, wherever. I do love to travel, especially in Europe. I love get-ting on a plane and being in a different culture an hour or two later. I don’t feel especially British. More European. Of course it will all be the same soon.”

Joan is also a compulsive shopper. “I love to buy things — antiques and such. I’m always buying things when I travel.” She is also an excellent designer. The white fringed caftan she wore, an unusual print of white blurred into mauve, was designed by her. “I can’t sew, but I love designing my own clothes. I designed this and had it made,” she said. “I almost became a designer once before I decided on acting.”