Meeting Stephanie Beacham after her former co-star Joan Collins stunned onlookers with her ageless appearance at the Emmys makes one wonder what they were putting in the water on the Dynasty set in the 1980s.
Or, as one disbelieving fan put it after witnessing 90-year-old Collins’ red carpet turn: ‘What kind of vampire diet is [she] on?’
One could equally ask the same of 76-year-old Beacham, who somehow remains as ravishing as when she played Sable Colby opposite Collins’ Alexis Carrington. So what did Stephanie make of Collins’ recent appearance? ‘I adore her. I said to her once: “You look fabulous, Joan” and while I would have said something like: “Thank you”, she replied: “I hope so. This make-up took an hour!”‘
In real life, though, Stephanie is far more circumspect about the importance of youthfulness. She tells me she’s had Botox, while playing Elizabeth I on stage in 2002, ‘so the smooth bald cap matched my forehead’.
It’s not an experience she wants to repeat. ‘My eyes fell down so I was suddenly looking through half-eyes and I prefer to keep my eyes wide open and wrinkle my brow like a Shar Pei dog.’
As for trying other cosmetic interventions such as facelifts, she says: ‘I look at my hands and unless I wore gloves the entire time, you’d see that there was an ancient person whose face was trying to be young. Plus my neck is a disgrace! It’s got some sort of map of the world written all over it now.’ She adds, wisely: ‘But you know what? That’s called getting older and it’s what we do if we’re very lucky.’
Ageing has been on Stephanie’s mind of late. The actress, the onscreen love interest of everyone from Marlon Brando to Coronation Street’s Ken Barlow (played by William Roache), admits that when she was burgled in October 2022 — a truly terrifying experience where a drug addict threatened her with a crowbar in her West London cottage — ‘I feared for my life. It was the very first time I felt old because I knew there was absolutely nothing I could do.’
Joan Collins (left) and Stephanie Beacham starring in Dynasty, which aired throughout the 1980s
While Stephanie Beacham admits she had botox in 2002, she says she isn’t interested in further interventions, saying that getting older is ‘what we do if we’re very lucky’
Any victim of crime will identify with the feelings of vulnerability Stephanie suffered. Speaking for the first time about that day, she says it turned her into ‘a snivelling, fearful heap’.
Little wonder. Sharing the chilling details of the attack, Stephanie recalls what happened when burglar David Wilson — later described in court as a ‘habitual career burglar’ with long-term drug addiction issues — broke into her home.
‘He held a crowbar over my head, saying: “Give me your money. Give me your jewellery. Don’t look at me. Don’t look at me!” she says. ‘And then he said: “I wish you weren’t here.” That was not too good because when I heard that I thought: “Oh. In a minute, I’m going to die.”‘
She recounts how he ordered her into the bathroom ‘and I couldn’t run there fast enough,’ she says. ‘He was a bug-eyed fellow and his eyes were not reliable [because of the drugs].
‘A few minutes later he rattled the door and I thought to myself: “Come on, Stephanie. You’re being disgracefully snivelling. Now, what would Jodie Foster do?” I don’t know why I thought of Jodie Foster and what she does in that film [Panic Room],’ she admits.
‘But do you know what I did? I picked up a sponge that was on the end of a plastic stick and I was holding it like some sort of weapon. I mean, what exactly was I going to do?’ she asks. ‘Wash his face?’
As Wilson stole items including her purse, mobile phone and keys, she waited in there, in terror.
‘It was fortunate my jewellery was kept elsewhere and I was very lucky. I was about to do some gardening, so I didn’t have any rings on. I’ve had my jewellery burgled before — all my grandmother’s precious things — and it’s awful because they take your memories with them.’
The police, she says, ‘were amazing. [Wilson] was on my CCTV swinging his crowbar and they caught him. I said to the CID guy a few weeks later when I was giving my statement that I felt a bit bad because he only broke open my conservatory and stole a few credit cards and my keys — all the normal rubbish [burglars] do to make your life a misery. But he looked at me and said: “No. I heard your 999 call. You thought you were going to die.” And that was true.’
For while she is, one soon gathers, not one to wallow in self-pity, the effects from that day understandably linger. In her victim statement read in court last year, she admitted experiencing panic attacks and difficulties learning lines for her role in Corrie.
There was an understandable change, too, in how she viewed the home where she had lived happily for 25 years. ‘I’d always thought of this as my little secret cottage, but you experience something like this and it affects you,’ she says.
‘There’s no point in pretending it doesn’t. When I came back down to London from [filming in] Manchester a week after it had happened, a friend of mine had got the place ready. But I could see a hologram, almost, of [Wilson] still in my bedroom and I thought to myself: “How dare he!” It’s nasty even talking about it now.’
Wilson pleaded guilty to aggravated burglary and was jailed for ten years and five months. ‘I do think: poor man. He was a drug addict needing money for drugs, I suppose, and even his face was cut from falling through the conservatory.
Stephanie Beacham in 1971 film The Nightcomers opposite heartthrob Marlon Brando, who she had a relationship with around the time
Ms Beacham says that during the 1970s, she kept a £5 note sewn inside the lining of her coat to pay for a cab if she ever needed to escape an awkward situation
‘It’s quite correct that he should not get away with what he did, but also, to be on drugs because your life is so bad that you need to hide away from it, well,’ she says, ‘you can see the wretchedness.’
Immediately after the burglary, Stephanie’s then 21-year-old grandson, Jude, offered to come and stay with her. ‘I mean, you’ve got other things to do at 21 than care about your grandmother, but he got on his white charger for me.
‘So, really,’ she continues, ‘how lucky am I? When I wake up in the morning, I still feel like a child because I realise that this day, too, I will learn something new. It’s amazing my life is still turning corners I didn’t think I’d see.’
That’s also true of her career. Last month saw the release of the romantic sci-fi thriller, Forever Young, in which she stars with Diana Quick, while audiences will see a new side to her in the incredibly moving film Grey Matter, out next week, playing a grandmother with Alzheimer’s.
‘I went through that journey with my father who had it,’ she says. ‘It was a challenging and humbling experience to play that wandering mind and investigate that childlike panic. It tore our family to shreds seeing him go from this wonderful, gentle man to nothing.’
Born in Barnet, one of four children to Joan, a housewife, and Alec, an insurance executive, by 17 Stephanie had already left school to study mime in Paris. Despite being born deaf in one ear, it proved little barrier and by her early 20s she was starring opposite Marlon Brando in the Michael Winner film, The Nightcomers.
She began dating her celebrated co-star, ‘and he was a wild animal,’ she recalls fondly, ‘a great big bear… and a very good friend. I wasn’t in love with him, but I loved him and he cared for me.’
When Brando’s son, Christian, was sent to prison in 1991 for a fatal shooting, Stephanie phoned her former beau. ‘And I think I was the only person who did call him,’ she says. ‘I told him: “I feel like a rabbit trying to help a bear because I don’t think there’s anything I can do, but I’m here for you.” I think he appreciated it as he phoned me every day after that for ages.’
Brando even acted as Stephanie’s unofficial intimacy co-ordinator — before such things even existed — by donning wellies and a huge set of Y-Fronts himself during a love scene for The Nightcomers, ‘because he didn’t trust Michael Winner not to shoot the whole of me naked,’ she says. ‘So you see my t**s flying everywhere onscreen, but nothing below the waist and that’s because of him.’
Other experiences were unfortunately far worse. Eight years ago she admitted she had been raped in the early 1970s, ‘and that was the most awfully stupid thing I’ve ever said. It’s such a personal thing, your own experience, and I had absolutely no intention of talking about it, but I fell into a headline during the whole #MeToo thing.’
Of the movement itself, she says: ‘It’s important women no longer think that it’s all their fault and that men understand they have the responsibility to act as human beings and do not have the right to be predatorial.
‘On the other hand, there is also a basic dance between men and women that must also not go missing. It’s a complex picture.’
Throughout her career, Stephanie has had her own brushes with unsavoury men. ‘There was a lot of predatory behaviour,’ she says of the 1970s. ‘I was lucky because I realised that if I was fast on my feet and fast in my mind, I could avoid the traps. I even had a £5 note sewn inside the lining of my coat to pay for a cab if I ever got into an awkward situation.’
Her canniness, however, couldn’t prevent her from being blacklisted from Hollywood.
When producer Joseph E. Levine promised her an Oscar nomination for her role in The Nightcomers if she stripped for Playboy, Stephanie refused and Levine promptly pronounced her ‘dead in this business’. It was 15 years before she worked in Hollywood again.
When she did return, with Dynasty, it was with a bang. Though she had been working non-stop in theatre, it was still hard raising her daughters — Phoebe, now 49, and Chloe, 47 — as a single mother after her divorce from actor John McEnery in 1979.
Did she and Joan Collins have some fun nights out together at the height of their fame? ‘We never went on the town together. She never understood — and then she got it — that I was never going to be competition to her socially.
‘She liked the best table at [famous LA restaurant] Chasen’s and I didn’t need that. Just leave me to my surfer dudes and put me on the beach with those rolling waves and I’m in heaven.’
The surfer dudes are now a thing of the past. After relationships with men including Eric Clapton and Imran Khan, as well as a well-publicised fondness for younger men (‘I took them in as boys of 27 and sent them off as men of 32,’ she once joked), she has been happily ensconced with doctor Bernie Greenwood, 84, for 16 years.
He proposed in 2013, ‘but we can never agree on the same sort of wedding! He would just like to be married, I think, and I feel: if it ain’t broke, why fix it? I think he’s given up now.’
Looking back on her life, Stephanie is thankful for the foundations her parents laid down and magnanimous about the times things haven’t gone to plan.
‘I had the advantage of loving parents, a good education and a lovely home, so I just feel so blessed,’ she says, adding: ‘But then anybody who has jumped at life and swallowed it whole as I have has made some corking mistakes. That’s just the way it goes.’
One surprising miscalculation was taking part in Strictly Come Dancing in 2007. The invariably upbeat Stephanie is unusually negative about her experience: ‘Hated every minute of it, darling.’
Why? ‘A friend of mine had just committed suicide and I said: “I really can’t do this now” and they said, “You must do it, it’ll be fun.”‘
‘But you can’t do Strictly for fun. You really need to have the intention to win or to lose weight or to do all those other things, so I loathed it. It was the wrong time and it just wasn’t a fit for me.’
It was recently reported that actress Amanda Abbington had been diagnosed with PTSD after her Strictly appearance and had asked BBC bosses to hand over footage of her rehearsals with partner, Giovanni Pernice. (The BBC insists Strictly ‘has always taken duty of care incredibly seriously’).
‘The thing is, most of us don’t understand quite how hard dancers work,’ says Stephanie, ‘and you suddenly have to get a dancer’s ethic… it is quite alarming and it is enormously frightening and I’d say, if you’re not used to being frightened, don’t do something like Strictly.’
And in that delightfully forthright manner of hers, she adds: ‘After all, it’s just a wretched show!’
- Grey Matter is out in selected cinemas from Monday; go to w4films.co.uk to see listings. Forever Young is available to stream now on digital platforms.