Ain’t nothing like MADAME JOAN

She’s a legend, icon and one of the most enduring movie stars of all time. As JOAN COLLINS celebrates 70 years in the business, her best friend Piers Morgan joins her for lunch. And, from sex (‘two times a day is too much, dahling’) to rich men (‘mean and

Joan Collins elegantly speared a large piece of sea bass at Club 55, our mutual favourite St Tropez beach restaurant, and made a sudden dramatic, tablesilencing announcement. ‘This year is my 70th year in the movie business!’ she declared.

‘Sorry, WHAT?’ I replied, astounded by what I’d just heard. ‘You’ve been making films for 15 years longer than I’ve been alive?’

‘Don’t sound so surprised, dahling,’ she chuckled theatrically. ‘I’ve been doing a lot of things for longer than you’ve been alive.’ ‘What was your first film?’

‘Lady Godiva Rides Again [released name was Bikini Baby]. I played a beauty contestant.’

Indeed, she did, in a cast that read like a Who’s Who of acting – Diana Dors, Sid James, Trevor Howard, George

Cole, Dora Bryan, Stanley Holloway,

Kay Kendall, Jean Marsh, Alastair Sim and, incredibly, Ruth Ellis, who four years later became the last person to be hanged in Britain.

Blink and you’d miss her, but Joan’s movie career was off and running, and it’s never stopped running. She’s now made 76 films in what has become one of the most durable and successful careers in Hollywood history.

Full disclosure: I love Joan Collins. We dine out together many times a year and she’s one of the sharpest, funniest, most glamorous people I know.

She doesn’t suffer fools – never mind gladly, not at all! – and has a natural brutal honesty that means she won’t hesitate to tell you if she thinks you’re speaking utter nonsense.

And she has a deliciously Sicilian streak towards those who cross her.

When former BBC newsreader Michael Buerk interviewed her for Radio Times and made a series of sly digs about her age, she retaliated with a stinging attack on him in the Daily Mail headlined: ‘Buerk by name, Buerk by nature.’

But what I love most about her is her boundless energy and zest for life.

She won’t like me saying this, but the great dame is now 87. Yet she radiates relentlessly high-octane joie de vivre, which shames people half her age.

Joan’s been married five times, in a lengthy pursuit of marital compatibility that finally led her to the arms of handsome Peruvianborn theatre producer

Percy Gibson – her longest-lasting husband at

18 years and counting, and her final husband (‘I will never be with anyone else but Percy,’ she often tells me).

Percy, 55, is a great guy

– as bright, witty and mischievous as his wife, and oozing old-school charm, manners and decency. His devotion to Joan is palpable, but so is hers to him.

I count them now as two of my very best friends. So it was with some trepidation that I agreed to interview

Joan to mark the start of her 70th anniversary year.

After all, she’s personally told me where a lot of her bodies are buried… how far could I push her to repeat all the fabulous stories she’s regaled us with over dinner?

Would I get the waspish Alexis Carrington Colby treatment if I overstepped the mark?

There was only one way to find out…