Joan Collins Shares Secrets To 21-Year Marriage, And One Of Them Is Scrabble

32 years separate Joan Collins from her husband, Percy Gibson. However, the two have been husband and wife for 21 years. In a recent interview with PEOPLE for this week’s issue, Collins reflected on how she and Gibson make their marriage work despite what might seem like hurdles.

Collins and Gibson met back in 2000 while working on the play Love Letters, which Gibson produced. Reflecting on their powerful bond in her memoir, 2011’s The World According to Joan, Collins mused, “I kissed a lot of frogs before I found my prince.” Here’s how they keep giving their marriage the royal treatment.

Joan Collins says that her marriage to Percy Gibson is aided by plenty of shared hobbies

Each of them has plenty in common, and those similarities are both grand and small. “First of all, Percy and I were working together and we became great friends,” Collins mused. “We found we had a lot in common. We like the same things. We like doing the same things.”

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“We both adored the theater,” she continued. “and particularly musical theater. We love reading. We love playing cards or playing Scrabble. Neither of us are particularly outdoor[sy] people. You know, he doesn’t go running out to football games. And we love going to the theater and films and we just got along.”

For Collins, all these similarities have her feeling like they are of “the same blood group.”

How Collins views things

While all of these traits have helped make for smooth sailing across two decades, there are also some other key factors. For instance, even among these two lovebirds, distance does make the heart grow fonder. So, the two operate using “separate bathrooms and the same bedroom.”

That doesn’t mean Collins considers him anything less than her Prince Charming after so many frogs. She calls him “a really nice, kind, grounded person,” adding, “Many of the people that I’ve been with – and I’m not going to specify which ones – have been either neurotic, slightly unbalanced, or gotten into different things.”

Outside of their orbit, there have been criticisms of the relationship between Collins, who turned 90 last spring, and a husband 32 years her junior. In the face of these criticisms, Collins asserts that “age is — as far as we’re concerned — just a number, and that’s the way that we both feel,” adding, “Obviously, we talked about it before we got married, but it isn’t in the slightest importance.”

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