Dynasty's Queen

For nearly 50 years Joan Collins has made a career of being a most difficult woman.

"No, no you idiot, when I ordered a shiatsu, I meant a massage, not a dog," she is overheard saying.

"I don't exactly suffer fools gladly," she explains.

And in her latest project, the TV movie These Old Broads, she appears with Hollywood legends Debbie Reynolds, Shirley MacLaine and Elizabeth Taylor. At age 67, she's still doing what she does best, as Correspondent Troy Roberts reports.

Flashy has been her bread and butter (witness Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat), though she's played the vamp and the temptress,(The Stud) and the vixen (The Bitch).

"But I think I play b----es pretty well," Collins says.

She is arguably the most popular difficult lady in television history. She was Dynasty's much married, much hated Alexis Carrington.

"You heard him, Blake; you're finished; you've lost everything, and I now own this house," she declared on Dynasty.

Alexis could be considered the role of a life time.

"Take this junk and your blond tramp and get out of my home," she also declared on Dynasty.

"She was the perfect vixen," says Dynasty creator and producer Aaron Spelling. "It's just the way she delivered lines. It's the way she could be very b----y. But then you would smile at her b----iness and you would root for her."

People confuse her with the character, she concedes. "It's not irritating," she says. "It's sad really. But I understand it."

It would be easy to confuse Collins with her fictional alter ego; they have the same expensive tastes.

If she could be tempted by something it would be "a nice big pot of caviar," she says.

Then there's her mercurial temperament and failed marriages, four of them, to be exact.

Has she soured on love? "You think I want to become a nun? she asks. "My mother told me that all men are rats and those that aren't are boring," she says.

What is the key to surviving in a town where they eat their own? "Not giving a s--- about what they think," she declares.

But behind that façade her friends and family see a different side.

"She's had the most appalling obstacles to overcome," says her son, artist Sacha Newley.

"She has a vulnerable side; she doesn't show it off much; it's really reserved for those who are very close to her," he says.

Collins was a rising young star in England when Hollywood came calling in the mid-1950s. She signed a multiyear contract at 20th Century Fox and went on to appear in more than 50 movies, but that perfect part, that career-defining role, woulelude her for years.

"I did a lot of stuff that wasn't very good," Collins admits.

"I was queen of the horror films in the mid-'70s," she adds.

So Dynasty saved her financially and professionally? "God, yes, absolutely," she says.

A decade after her phenomenal success with Dynasty, she hasn't found that next great role.

"You cannot rely on this profession to live on, so you have to have another string to your bow which is why I started writing," she says.

Like her sister, the hugely popular author Jackie Collins, Joan Collins writes books chronicling the jet-set society in often lurid sexual situations. Many of hers have become bestsellers.

Now in her late sixties, Joan Collins' 14-year relationship with art dealer Robin Hurlstone, several years her junior, is the stuff romantic novels are made of, but she refuses to talk about him.

"Yeah, two decades," she says of the age difference.

What does he bring to the relationship, Troy Roberts asked.

"Oh, get out of here! I told you I wasn't going to discuss it," she replies. "So naughty."

She is more forthcoming, though, about her other love: 2-year-old granddaughter Miel. "This, of course, is my little baby," Joan Collins says.

In Los Angeles, 48 Hours spent part of the day shopping with her.

"When you said you wanted to go shopping, I was thinking Harry Winston, Hermes," says Roberts.

"This is called Toys R Us," she says. "This is where you go to get presents for children."

"So what I'm looking for - you're going to help me - is a computer for a 2-year-old," she says.

"I can't believe the hideousness of this one," she declares of a doll.

"She manages to blend being a great mother, a great grandmother, and her career," says her daughter, British TV host Tara Newley. "I'm in awe of her."

"I just think that she's a brilliant gran. And she'd hate me for saying gran," Tara Newley adds."We don't necessarily use the word gran," she explains.

During her frequent visits to London, the reluctant grandmother has clearly warmed to the role.

What has been the best advice she's given her daughter about parenting?

"I'm not very good at giving advice,...really I'm not. You do the best you can," she says. "You know what is a good mother? It's just care, health and love."

While Joan Collins has not yet been anointed a great dame by Hollywood standards, there may be no greater role than the one she's been living.

What makes a great dame?

"I suppose a mixture of strength, age, resilience, wiseness," she says.