Picks and Pans Review: Talking With...joan Collins

>The more things change…More than a decade after she ruled prime time as scheming Alexis Carrington Colby on Dynasty, Joan Collins is once again vamping it up, this time as the devious tycoon Alexandra Spaulding on CBS’s long-running daytime soap Guiding Light. “I may have much smaller hair,” says Collins, “but I can still play a manipulative woman who wants to take over the world.”

Not that the 69-year-old London-born diva hasn’t had to make some adjustments for the part. In January Collins and her fifth husband, theatrical manager Percy Gibson, 37 (they wed in February), abandoned their L.A. home for a condo in Manhattan. And Collins now works in a dressing room she cheerfully describes as “the size of a large coffee table.”

But one of the toughest parts has been coping with the voluminous scripts. With no cue cards allowed on the Light set, “you have to keep 25 pages of dialogue in your head [every day],” says Collins. “We rehearse five scenes and shoot them one after another. It’s like opening night at the theater.” But Collins isn’t complaining. “All the other actors do the same,” she says, striking a very un-Alexis-like note. “Why should I rock the boat?”