Editor’s Note: Liz Smith profiles Joan Collins — the sultry, glamorous beauty — in the spring issue of Q, Quest’s quarterly magazine.Here we present the full story as Liz wrote it. To see the article as it appeared in Q, including photos of Joan Collins, click here.

“I never chased fame!”

So said Joan Collins. Of course Joan said this when fame — real fame! — had finally caught up with her, during her spectacular reign on TV’s “Dynasty.” Once one is that world famous, one can say anything convincingly.

London-born Joan never fails to remind people that she began her career as a student of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She asserts, “I came into this business to be a theater actress.” Yes, indeed. And if you have ever had the pleasure of seeing Joan onstage, she is as vivid and striking as her image on screens, large and small. (But if you don’t want fame at all, you stay at home and become … nothing. You don’t go into the theater. If you do, you are sure to be noticed, one way or another.)

Miss Collins was noticed. She made her 1946 stage début in Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” as … a boy. In 1954, she starred at The Queen’s Theater as Sabrina in Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth.” But between those significant appearances she had been signed by the British film studio, Rank. (Her photos were everywhere!) She was first seen onscreen in “Lady Godiva Rides Again.” British audiences were alert to her charms. Miss Collins was even more alert. She complained that Rank — and British cinema in general — didn’t build up its female players. “They concentrate on the men.” Remember, now, she wasn’t chasing fame. She was just concerned about the British cinema.

American film studios did build female stars. One of the biggest — 20th Century Fox — got a look at Collins and snapped her up. Fox was most famous for its blonde stars — Shirley Temple, Alice Faye, Betty Grable, and the studio’s Ultimate Blonde, Marilyn Monroe. However, Fox had also nurtured the career of the darkly luscious Linda Darnell. By 1954, Darnell — not yet 30! — was considered over the hill, and Collins, fresh and in her 20s, was brought in.

The second Joan Collins set foot in Hollywood, she was compared to another English rose, Elizabeth Taylor — a comparison that would irk Joan for years. Yes, they were both British. Yes, they were both brunette. Yes, they could both stop a room with their beauty. But in truth they had little in common, as actresses or as women. Elizabeth had a creamy, classic, cameo beauty, an idealized face from another century. Joan was almost alien in her knockout look – widely spaced eyes, zooming cheekbones, an ultra-lush mouth. She was also, then, a much livelier personality — cheeky and bold. (Liz was constrained by MGM, which demanded ladylike decorum. By the late ’50s, Taylor had gotten over that!) In truth, Jean Simmons, yet another Brit import, looked more like Taylor.

Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper wrote of watching Taylor, Simmons and Collins enter a room together in 1955, and how surreal it was, all that sultry beauty, sweeping in, blotting out every blonde in sight. Miss Collins was also blessed with the sort of face (and head) that can never enjoy too much makeup or too many wigs. The more you put on her, the better she looks. This ability to blossom amid cosmetic and style excess would come in handy during the “Dynasty” years.

But before Fox could try to mold her, Warner Bros put Joan into “Land of the Pharaohs.” It was a typical sex-and-sand tale that was elevated by her outrageous posturing as the murderous, avaricious second wife of Pharaoh. This was a fully fleshed early peek at Joan’s later persona as “Dynasty’s” Alexis Carrington-Colby-Dexter-Whatever.