London – As Alexis Carrington in the glossy soap opera Dynasty, she was a difficult and controlling mother.
Dame Joan Collins’ portrayal may have been closer to life than audiences realised, according to her only son.
Sacha Newley, 49, said he loves the 81-year-old actress ‘deeper than I can process’ but added that he had a strained childhood relationship with her and described her as a ‘narcissist’ who ‘abandoned’ him and his sister Tara, 51.
The portrait painter also said: ‘Her life still seems far too dramatic. Too much is happening. She is always dealing with some disaster. As much as she says she longs for a peaceful life, I don’t think she could handle it.’
Newley, whose father was Collins’s second husband, the actor and singer Anthony Newley, has described his early life in a yet to be published memoir, Hollywood Child; the rights have been bought by a film producer.
‘My mother wasn’t a monster, she was a narcissist,’ he said in an interview with the Sunday Times.
‘I can’t remember her hugging me, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
‘I just wanted mommy to love me, and I wanted a connection with the mommy I found so overwhelming and so dazzling. She nourished me in a way a muse nourishes; at a distance.’
He claimed his mother handed over care of her two children to a nanny because she was ‘overwhelmed’ by being a mother, leading him to feel she had abandoned him.
Newley puts his mother’s alleged coldness down to her difficult relationship with her own father. ‘It’s true to say my mother didn’t receive a great deal of affection from her father,’ he said. ‘He was a glacier. My mother didn’t get physical warmth from her father and a girl needs that.’
He also revealed his unusual relationship with the nanny, Sue Delong, who later committed suicide after being fired from a series of jobs. He said how he would get almost sexual gratification from her physical methods of disciplining him.
He said: ‘There was a lot of S&M. She wouldn’t just sit on me, but sit and grind me into the carpet. It was like the relationship boys might have with their older brothers, but in my case it was with a woman who was employed, so it had a different frisson about it.’
Newley said that he and his mother – who married fifth husband Percy Gibson, 49, in 2002 – are currently ‘recalibrating’ their relationship and have frequent lunches so they can talk.
He also gave his assessment of his father, who died in 1999. While describing him as a musical genius, ‘the third in the holy trinity of Sinatra and Sammy Davis’, he put his father’s comparative lack of success down to his womanising.
Asked for a comment, a spokesman for Collins said she had been told by her son that the Sunday Times interview was ‘sensationalised’.
Daily Mail