Last November we posted a photo of a dark-haired woman with knowing eyes and a very familiar smile, and we gave you just one hint: “Dad was an actor too, but Mom IS STILL fiery at 92!” Plenty of you guessed it in the comments. The woman is Tara Newley, the eldest child of Joan Collins, and her father was the British actor, singer and songwriter Anthony Newley. Joan has had a birthday since then, and Tara turned 63 on October 12, so the clue needs a small update. Mom is 93 now, and every bit as fiery.
Joan has three children, and each one took a very different road away from the spotlight that followed their mother from 1950s Hollywood to Alexis Carrington on Dynasty. One became a painter whose portraits hang in the Smithsonian. One survived an accident doctors told Joan she would not live through. And Tara, the one who looks most like her, has spent four decades finding her own voice on the radio, on the page and on stage. Here is where all three are today.
Who Was The Actor Dad Behind The Clue?
Joan Collins married Anthony Newley on May 27, 1963, in Norwalk, Connecticut, and Tara Cynara Newley arrived that October 12 in New York City. Her brother Alexander, who has always gone by Sacha, followed on September 8, 1965. Newley was a phenomenon at the time. He had starred in Stop the World, I Want to Get Off on Broadway, and with his writing partner Leslie Bricusse he would go on to write the songs for Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, including “Pure Imagination.”
The marriage ended in 1971, but the bond between father and daughter did not. When Tara turned 62 last year, Joan marked the day on Instagram with a rare baby photo of Tara in Newley’s arms, and Parade reported the post alongside a recent shot of mother and daughter together. Newley died of cancer at his home in Jensen Beach, Florida, on April 14, 1999. He was 67, and he had only recently become a grandfather through Tara.
Growing up between two famous parents was not easy for either Newley child, and Tara has been honest about that. “Surrounded by so much talent, you have to find what makes you happy rather than compete with such stellar entities,” she said, in comments People gathered in its guide to Joan’s children. Her younger brother found his answer with a paintbrush.
What Did Joan Collins’ Son Sacha Become?
Sacha Newley, now 61, is a portrait painter, and a serious one. His portraits of Gore Vidal and Christopher Reeve are in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, and his sitters have included Billy Wilder. He told Interview magazine that he “came to portraiture through an interest in meditation” and the nature of consciousness, which started in his early teens. “I have always been really interested in people,” he added, “because people’s fundamental reality is a mystery to them.”
His own family has been one of his subjects. At a 2008 London show of paintings about his late father, he told Hello! the work had been “quite cathartic,” and he mentioned one more sitter close to home. “I’ve painted my mother twice,” he said. In 2017 he went further with Unaccompanied Minor, a memoir about his childhood shuttling between two stars and illustrated with his own paintings.
Sacha has a daughter from his first marriage, to jewelry designer Angela Tassoni. Then, in the late summer of 2025, Joan walked her son down the aisle when he married Sheela Raman in Salzburg, Austria. The celebrations lasted three days. “It was a magical three days,” Joan wrote afterward. Her youngest child’s story is a much quieter one, and it nearly ended when she was a little girl.
Why Does Joan Call Katy Her Fellow Gemini?
Joan’s third husband was Ron Kass, the American record executive who ran Apple Records for The Beatles. They married in 1972, and their daughter Katyana arrived on June 20 of that year, which makes Katy a Gemini like her mother, who was born May 23. Joan has used that shared sign in birthday posts for years. “Happy Birthday to my favorite fellow Gemini, my beautiful daughter Katy!” she wrote in 2022.
Those birthdays almost stopped at eight. In August 1980 Katy was hit by a car, and the injuries were so severe that doctors prepared her mother for the worst. “She was knocked down by a car and sustained very serious brain injuries and I was told that she was going to die,” Joan said in her 2022 documentary This Is Joan Collins, calling it the “worst thing that ever happened” to her. Katy spent weeks in a coma before she pulled through.
Joan and Ron Kass divorced in 1983. Kass died of cancer in Los Angeles on October 17, 1986, at just 51. Katy, now 54, has kept to a private life ever since, and she shows up mostly in her mother’s photos. This March, for Mother’s Day in the U.K., Joan posted a picture with Katy and her husband Percy Gibson and wrote, “What a lovely Mother’s day with my wonderful daughter and husband,” as Hello! reported. Which brings us back to the daughter in our card, and to what she has been doing all these years.
So What Does Tara Newley Do Now?
Tara studied literature at Boston University and came home to London to build a career with words. She worked as a journalist, a columnist and a screenwriter, and she spent time behind the microphone as a presenter at an all-female radio station. That job gave her the idea for a novel about a feisty DJ named Cassandra Bates. She wrote it nearly 20 years before it was published, but when no one would take it she shelved it and moved on to other projects.
The book, Radio Honey, finally came out in 2020 under her married name, Tara Arkle. She married writer Nick Arkle in 2016, and she has two grown children, Miel and Weston, which makes Joan a grandmother through her eldest. Joan was one of the first to cheer. She called it a “fabulously funny novel, full of great insights into the female psyche” on Instagram.
As for that resemblance in our card, Tara has spent most of her life hearing about it, and she is happy to talk about the woman behind it. Speaking to The Sunday Times in 2020, she called her mother “an incredibly supportive, loving mother and friend.” Then she added the line that sums Joan up better than any Dynasty catfight ever could. “When you get down to it, she’s not very different to most mums,” Tara said. “She just happens to be Joan Collins, a total legend.”
Joan, for her part, has never been shy about how much the three of them mean to her. Seeing her children happy is “what makes me happiest,” she once told Hello!, and in 2022 she put it simply: “Motherhood was really exciting and I love every minute of it.” When she wished Tara a happy 62nd birthday last October, calling her “my beautiful talented warm-hearted daughter,” the reply came straight back in the comments. “Thank you Mamma!! I love you SO MUCH!!!”
And yes, if you’re wondering, Joan is still at it. At 93 she has lovingly remembered her sister Jackie, attended Cannes in May for My Duchess, the film in which she plays Wallis Simpson, and turned up in a black trouser suit and high-heeled boots for a BAFTA preview of it in London, as the critic Kate Muir reported this week. Fiery, just like we said.
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