Dame Joan Collins has revealed the traumatic experience she had when she underwent an abortion at the age of 26. In her upcoming memoir ‘Behind The Shoulder Pads,’ the 90-year-old actress opens up about the “horrifying” procedure she had after discovering her pregnancy. Collins conceived the child with her then-fiance Warren Beatty.
In an extract obtained by the Daily Mail newspaper, Collins writes, “A long time ago I had an abortion. I was living with my then fiance Warren Beatty, at the time a young, unknown actor. Even though I was careful, I fell pregnant.”
Recalling the moment she told Beatty about the pregnancy, Collins said, “‘I think I’m pregnant,’ I said, coming into the kitchen one day, where he was preparing one of his health concoctions in the blender. He stopped slicing bananas and pouring wheatgerm, took off his glasses and stared at me. Without his glasses he was quite myopic and I wondered why he didn’t want to look at me. ‘Pregnant?’ he asked in his puzzled little boy voice. ‘How did that happen?'”
Despite feeling complicit, Collins expressed her sorry and discussed the situation with Beatty. “Abortion was a dirty word in the early 1960s. In fact, so was s*x. Even living together as Warren and I did was considered sinful,” Collins added.
Collins explained that she did not want a “shotgun” wedding and feared that having a baby would harm her career. She wrote, “Warren and I were engaged, so we could get married, of course, but I was not in favor of ‘shotgun’ weddings. The few times we had discussed marriage we had both decided that we were too immature to make it work. He was only 23, a struggling wannabe actor with a potentially great career as a s*x symbol ahead of him if the future movies he was angling for came to fruition. As a successful 26-year-old actress under contract to 20th Century Fox, having a baby out of wedlock would have been for me career suicide. With the eyes of the gossip columnists on us, nagging in print for us to ‘tie the knot,’ it would have been an impossibility. So, I dried my tears, putting his ambition and my career first, and mooched about until it was time to drive to New Jersey.”
After the abortion, Collins tried not to dwell on the traumatic experience. “I didn’t want to think about what had happened last night. It was too vivid and too painful. But the next day I felt much better and full of energy again. I pushed the horrifying abortion out of my head. Done. Over. Forgotten,” she added.
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