It diminishes her when she intends it to have the opposite effect.
Joan had a pretty good reputation as a professional before DYNASTY --- pretty, an adequate actress, well-behaved. But she was told early in her career by industry people things like "you
must pull rank" as a star, and once she'd really become one with Alexis, she took that advice quite seriously, which translated to becoming difficult for difficulty's sake, and then became less harmless.
Michael Nader said that Joan "could be hard to take" on the set, and that Forsythe didn't feel her "self-centeredness" was necessarily good for the show. But the real problem came later, after the show was over, and she started going around trashing people -- especially if she thought they were too nice, too second tier -- or too dead .-- to retaliate.
Let's not forget how she trashed Linda in 2007 once their "Legends" tour had ended. Linda wasn't going to do the play, in part because she knew what touring the country with Joan would be like, but Nolan Miller and others convinced Linda to do it. Linda later said it was "even harder" than she'd anticipated, reportedly because of Collins, and when Joan went public with an article in the British press entitled "Why I'll Never Work with Linda Evans Again!", detailing mostly Joan's own pettiness and explaining why Linda
should be jealous because Joan had several homes and several children while childless Linda only has one house in the woods, Evans' representative took the rare step of publicly telling Joan to "shut the eff up!" leading Joan to immediately make her way to the press and indignantly respond "well, thanks a
lot, Linder!"' as if Linda had somehow started it. But you knew Collins was secretly thrilled Linda had thrown her a bone, condescending to answer the charges and briefly participate in this tête-à-tête in the media.
In 2009, Linda said about "Legends" that, "I don't know exactly what happened, but there always seemed to be more drama backstage than there was onstage." And then Linda, far cleverer than Krystle Carrington, appeared in Britain's version of HELL'S KITCHEN and subsequently won based essentially on how nice she was.
So Joan's just silly. She loves the Old Hollywood era when actresses like Crawford and Davis (both of whom weren't very nice to her, which she respected) bitched each other out in the magazines, protected by their studios. So it's all about status, attention, and fun-and-games to Collins, and the more unfair the commentary, the better.
Exhausting, yes, but what can you do about it? At least Emma Samms had the moxie to defend Forsythe this week.
