Stephanie Beacham: ‘The Playboy pictures I did lost me a $1 million contract'

Telegraph

28-02-2025

'Daddy tried to keep his Alzheimer's from us for a long time,' Stephanie Beacham remembers, her eyes watering as she talks. 'If the family was all together in a café' – she has two sisters, one older and one younger – 'he'd pretend to be the waiter and write down on a piece of paper what we all wanted, because he knew that between the table and the bar he would forget.'
Her adored father, Alec, a retired director of the Grosvenor Estate, was in his 80s at the time. When he died at 92 in 1999, she says: 'he didn't understand anything, didn't know it was us, was blind and deaf and could be quite scary if you tried to stroke his hand. He was wearing nappies. Alzheimer's is a foul disease.'
Best known for playing vampish Sable Colby in the 1980s romp Dynasty and its spin-off The Colbys – with big hair and even bigger shoulder pads, forever in competition with her first cousin Joan Collins's Alexis Carrington in what was dubbed 'the battle of the bitches' – Beacham, 78 on Friday, is delving into these traumatic family memories to explain why she agreed to probably the most against-type casting of her long career.
In the low-budget British independent film Grey Matter, she appears as you have never seen her before, without even a hint of lipstick. Filmed in Southwold in Suffolk, the film sees Beacham play Peg, a free-spirited woman who has a difficult relationship with her uptight daughter Eileen (Elizabeth Berrington) but has found a kindred spirit in Chloe, her granddaughter (Eloise Smyth). The onset of Alzheimer's is chronicled over a single summer as Chloe finishes school and becomes Peg's carer, fighting a losing battle to keep the grandmother she loves as every last bit of her personality and dignity are stripped away.
Even in her more recent small-screen incarnation as Martha Fraser, Ken Barlow's old flame in Coronation Street in 2009, reprised in 2022, Beacham brought with her a certain well-turned-out glamour to the Weatherfield cobbles. And, as we sit facing each other on plush pink sofas at either side of the fire in her bijou mews house in central London, she is the epitome of what she refers to as her 'low diva' personality – immaculately coiffed hair, elegant, cream beaded top and natty checked trousers.
The waft of Hollywood – where she lived the dream in the 1980s and 1990s in a pink cliff-top house in Malibu while appearing post- Dynasty in Beverly Hills 90210, Star Trek: The Next Generatio n and as an oceanographer in the Steven Spielberg-produced SeaQuest DSV – is only slightly undermined by her cosy sheepskin slippers.
When the script for Grey Matter landed on her desk, she recalls, 'I thought, are you kidding me? You are going to give me a job where I won't wear make-up, won't brush my hair. When Peg messes up on the loo, I just knew I had to do it.'
Really? 'It is more honest about who I truly am. After a certain age, you can only do a parody of good looks. You're an old woman; why not be a lonely old woman in a film that's all about heart and soul.'
Bristol-based dementia charity Brace helped fund Grey Matter, but Beacham needed no expert advice from them on how to convey the stages of Peg's decline – from forgetting to turn on the oven when she invites the family over for Sunday lunch, to struggling to remember names, wandering off, and losing the power of speech.
'One of the things that was very painful was hearing someone saying to my father in one of the homes he was in, 'Are you all right, Alec?' No one would have addressed him as that. He was near enough an Edwardian. Even at the seaside, he would wear a shirt with a collar. He was a gentle man.'
How those with Alzheimer's are treated by carers, even when families are paying more than they can afford, makes her angry. 'Early on, one of the staff said to Mummy when she was visiting Daddy, 'You must forget you had a husband.' Fancy saying that to her. Mummy just replied, 'As if I could forget.''
A quarter of a century since her father's death, a range of Alzheimer's tests now allow close relatives to assess their own risk, given that genetics can be a factor. Has Beacham been tempted to take one?
'I definitely want one, because I think there will be stuff that can be done about it, if not here then in America.'
While she long ago swapped Malibu for a 'proper family home' in Cornwall, again on a cliff top, with her partner since 2008, Bernie Greenwood, a retired West Country doctor, she still has a cottage in Catalonia, near Girona; this bolt hole in London; and an American retreat in Alabama ('It's very green and exotic, with a bayou at the end of the garden which means the odd alligator climbs out').
The US, she believes, offers better prospects on this front than the NHS 'because it routinely offers more advanced treatments sooner without the long waiting lists we have in the UK'.
But, she continues: 'I love the NHS. My fella Bernie is medical and I was born a year before the NHS started. I have always believed it was from birth until death. Well, it isn't. It's birth until you get ill.'
She isn't impressed by the Labour Government's attempts to rebuild trust in the NHS. 'We've got to really get on with sorting out social care, so people who are well enough to leave hospital but can't look after themselves are properly looked after. That's the first step to bring down waiting lists, but all they've done is commission another review.'
Hospices is another area she feels is under-resourced. 'We need to look after our older people better, but instead we are diving straight into the right to die. But can we please, first of all, have a few options, before you start killing us off like old dogs?'
If that makes it sound like she is against assisted dying, then she isn't. It is how you go about it. 'I'd like to feel that people didn't need to die in pain, that's all. Please don't let me die in pain. Can I just have enough stuff so I don't wake up? It's what always used to happen, quietly.'
Her accent, already very old-school English, becomes yet more crystal as she addresses the policymakers. And how we use words, she also insists, is similarly in decline. 'I do wish, for example, that we didn't have to call it assisted dying.'
She definitely isn't a fan of woke. 'Not a fan? I'm appalled. We can't be honest anymore. I don't agree with certain things. You can't have a discussion anymore.'
Does she worry, I ask, that some of her own back catalogue is now no longer shown because it fails the woke test? For example, she starred in Tenko, the early 1980s BBC drama series about a group of British and Commonwealth women interned in brutal conditions after the fall of Singapore in 1942. Could it be kept off our screens because it is judged to be too anti-Japanese?
Her eyes widen in shock. 'Well, they didn't rape us. They didn't fancy us.'
But they weren't very nice to their women prisoners. 'Well, we're not nice to a lot of people. I think the real difficulty is that it is too expensive to repeat.'
Tenko may have been what first made Beacham a household name, but it was dance, not acting, that was her first love. Raised in Barnet in suburban North London – as a young actress she would say she was born in Casablanca to appear more interesting – her mother Joan had chicken pox when pregnant with her and that left Beacham deaf in one ear and with 80 per cent hearing in the other.
She hasn't let it narrow her horizons. When daily ballet classes led to an audition for the Royal Ballet School, they didn't take her, citing her hearing loss. So she headed, at 17, to Paris, studying mime and training as a movement teacher for deaf children, before heading home and graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada) in 1967.
'I lived the 1960s so completely. They were pretty darn magic. I was at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1969 when Bob Dylan was playing with the Band.' Did she meet him? 'I only went to one party when Bob Dylan was there, but the atmosphere was definitely reverent, and that included Mick Jagger, who was there being reverential.'
Her acting career took off in the late 1960s with appearances in such television staples as The Saint and Jason King, but her big breakthrough came when cast by Michael Winner opposite Marlon Brando in 1971's The Nightcomers. Brando took her out on a date, and a friendship began that lasted until his death in 2004.
On set she had christened him 'Wellington' after he turned up to film their bedroom scene, in which she was nude, in his Y-fronts and a pair of Wellington boots. 'I'd signed a nudity clause, so I had to do naked scenes. He hadn't.' It was an early lesson in not getting pushed around.
Other love interests have included Eric Clapton and Imran Khan, but the MeToo movement has revealed a darker side of her industry. Did she have any bad experiences? 'Yes, of course,' she says. 'You had to use your brain, so I posed as being an intellectual. I'm not at all intelligent, but I frightened off quite a lot of the predators who were there.'
Straight after The Nightcomers, it was her drawing the line at 'gratuitous' nudity as demanded by an overbearing producer that cost her the leading role in Sam Peckinpah's Straw Do gs, which went to Susan George. 'I can be,' she laughs it off, 'a difficult old bitch.'
The rest of the decade was spent appearing on stage and in horror films – and having her two daughters, Phoebe in 1974, and Chloe in 1977, following her marriage to the actor John McEnery, which ended in divorce. She also miscarried a baby after an accident during rehearsals for Hamlet.
Tenko, at the start of the 1980s, reopened doors in the US, leading her to be chosen to play Sable Colby in Dynasty. Today she describes the decade it ran for as 'a time when my world turned Technicolor'.
'It was glorious fun and it gave me the school fees for my daughters and so many other openings. I met wonderful people.'
She had a ball, she says, and one she still reflects on 'with amazement and appreciation'. But she doesn't miss the pressure to be glamorous every time she stepped out of her Malibu front door. 'I'm done with big hair now,' she says.
She can, when she wants, recreate the Dynasty glamour, such as in 2022 when she stepped out at Joan Collins's 89th birthday at London's Claridges in a show-stopping, figure-hugging, feathered black gown and ornate diamond choker. On screen they were each other's nemesis, but in real life they remain firm friends.
'It could be difficult sometimes doing those 'battle of the bitches' scenes with Joan,' she says, 'She is always fabulously, brutally honest.'
But fame had another downside. Some old Playboy photographs Patrick Lichfield shot of her in the early 1970s that had never been published were unearthed in 1987 and published to coincide with the height of her fame as Sable Colby. She condemned the magazine's actions as 'wickedness' in her 2011 memoir Many Lives, but it is the fallout of the furore that ensued that sticks in her craw now. 'It lost me a $1 million make-up contract. I can't remember who with…'
Beacham, though, is not one to waste time on regrets. 'Look, it is going to be in a six-by-whatever coffin at the end. What does it matter if I have made a few bad decisions, most of them over property.'
As her list of homes suggest, she has also been something of a property developer on the side, but not always a successful one. 'There's been a couple of houses that are worth 50 times more now,' she lamented in a recent interview
In the autumn of 2022, she was subjected to a terrifying attack in her mews house by a burglar. 'I thought I was going to die. When someone has a crowbar over your head and says, 'I wish you weren't here', you think, 'This might be when I'm not here.''
It was a Sunday afternoon and she was wearing the unglamorous leftovers from her care home wardrobe in Grey Matter to do the courtyard garden outside her mews house when she was attacked. 'I gave him my jewellery, all plastic rubbish, and I got away with it. I got away with living.'
Does it haunt her now? 'No. I did have some counselling, so I can be in this house on my own now.'
She is sounding quite old-school stuff-and-nonsense about it, and swats away a suggestion that government, police and the London Mayor need to do more to get a grip on the epidemic of burglary.
'We can't expect the government to do all the things we expect the government to do now, can we? There needs to be much more communal coming together, to be neighbourly, to watch out for each other.'
She is much more exercised about government in the US. Her home in Alabama is, she says, 'very Trump-land. It is all so frightening that one can hardly bear to focus on it. I thought it would be comical but it isn't'.
Her post- Dynasty career in the US stalled in the 1990s in part because her parents' decline required her to spend much more time in Britain. Her mother had been diagnosed with cancer, which was successfully treated, but she needed ever more support with her husband living in a home.
'I based myself in England so I could phone Mummy on the same time-line each day and ask her what she had had for lunch.'
There have been professional highlights in this century too – Bad Girls, the ITV prison drama, in 2003; Strictly Come Dancing in 2007; Celebrity Big Brother in 2010; and guest slots in the usual suspects, including Death in Paradis e. But the going gets harder and she believes, counter-intuitively, that looking young for her age counts against her.
'The trick to getting cast is to look older than you are.' Why? 'Because if you are 78 playing 88, you have the energy to do 12 hours on set when an 88-year-old wouldn't. But I am all back-to-front. I look younger than my years, so if I play 68, as a 78-year-old, I still need a rest at lunchtime.'
Has she ever thought of – or had – surgery? 'What? When I have these lines here' – she points to her mouth – 'and this neck, I think we can say no. When I do yoga' – which is, she says, one of the secrets of her eternal youth – 'and I stay in the same position for a long time, I see the flesh run in rivulets down my arms. The veins in my hands are like the Nile.'
One life-extending secret, she confides, is dancing – not the ballet of old, nor even her none-too-successful ballroom stint on Strictly with Vincent Simone ('a shoe that didn't fit'), but 'bad mum dancing. And the eye cream I have used forever. I said to someone recently, 'Look, no wrinkles' and pointed to my eyes. They replied, 'Why didn't you put it on the rest of your face?''
It's her turn to laugh. 'I'm very keen on being 80 and being phenomenal for my age, whereas 78 is a bit iffy. I know another super role like Grey Matter is coming along soon. I'm entering a new phase in my career that will not be about looks and crossing my legs in high heel shoes.'
And a cure for Alzheimer's? 'We are beginning to know what causes it, but we are with Alzheimer's where we were with cancer 10 years ago. And we are much clever now with cancer than we were.'