Dame Joan Henrietta Collins is a legend of the stage and screen. Collins made her stage debut at just 9 years old and went on train at London’s prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, before landing her breakthrough role in 1981, when she was cast as Alexis Colby in the primetime ABC soap opera Dynasty. Collins played Colby for 9 seasons and was often credited as being the reason for the show’s consistent popularity and high ratings, winning a Golden Globe Award for the role in the category of Best Actress in a Drama Series.

Collins made her Broadway stage debut in 1990, starring as Amanda in a revival of the Noël Coward comedy of manners Private Lives, and has since performed regularly both on Broadway and the West End. Collins’ iconic status in popular culture resulted in guest appearances on a multitude of TV shows across the 90s and early 2000s, including Roseanne, The Nanny and Will & Grace. Collins, the sister of romance novelist Jackie Collins, is also a bestselling author of novels, lifestyle books and memoirs and has sold over 50 million copies of her books worldwide.

Throughout her career, Collins has been a public supporter of various social justice causes and has appeared in front of the US Congress to advocate for federal funding. In 1994, Collins was awarded the lifetime achievement award from the Association of Breast Cancer Studies and was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2015 by Queen Elizabeth II for her charitable work. In 2020, she penned an op-ed on the Covid-19 pandemic in British magazine The Spectator, titled ‘Vaccination is the only way out of this catastrophe’.