A car struck an eight-year-old on 2 August 1980, and forty-six years later that morning still shapes how this family is written about
Joan Collins’ 3 Children: Tara, Alexander and Katyana in 2026
Quick answer: Joan Collins has three children: Tara Newley, born 12 October 1963, and Alexander “Sacha” Newley, born 8 September 1965, with her second husband Anthony Newley, and Katyana “Katy” Kass, born 20 June 1972, with her third husband Ron Kass. On 20 August 2026 they are 62, 60 and 54. Profiles still printing 61, 59 and 53 are quoting ages that ran out during 2025.
Evidence date: Facts and ages checked 20 August 2026. Dated roles are not treated as permanent current jobs.
The birth order is simple once the dates sit in front of you. Tara Cynara Newley arrived first, in New York City on 12 October 1963, five months after Collins married the singer, songwriter and actor Anthony Newley in Norwalk, Connecticut. Alexander Anthony Newley, known to almost everyone as Sacha, followed on 8 September 1965. Katyana Kennedy Kass, called Katy, was born on 20 June 1972 to Collins and her third husband, the Apple Records and film executive Ron Kass. Two children in one branch, one in the other, and no children at all from her marriages to Maxwell Reed, Peter Holm or Percy Gibson.
The reason this search throws up three different sets of ages is arithmetic rather than disagreement. Anything written before October 2025 called Tara 61, and it was right at the time. Alexander is the one to watch this month: he is 60 on the date this guide was checked and turns 61 on 8 September 2026, so a summer profile and an autumn profile can both be accurate about the same man. The durable fact is the birth date. The age is a calculation, and a calculation needs a stamp on it.
All three children are adults with very different public footprints, and this guide treats that gap as information rather than a hole to be filled. Alexander’s work sits in a national museum collection and in two catalogued books with ISBNs. Tara’s broadcasting and print career is documented across three decades. Katyana lives privately and enters the record only when her mother chooses to share a family photograph. Where younger relatives appear, KidsCo publishes the names Joan Collins herself made public and stops there: no ages, no locations, no schools, no invented careers.
Joan Collins’ children at a glance
| Child | Born | Age on 20 August 2026 | Place in the family |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tara Cynara Newley | 12 October 1963, New York City | 62 | Eldest; first child with Anthony Newley |
| Alexander “Sacha” Newley | 8 September 1965, New York City | 60, and 61 on 8 September 2026 | Middle; second child with Anthony Newley |
| Katyana “Katy” Kass | 20 June 1972 | 54 | Youngest; only child with Ron Kass |
Every number in that fourth column is a subtraction from a verified birth date, which is exactly why it carries a date of its own. Tara stays 62 until 12 October 2026. Alexander stays 60 until 8 September 2026. Katyana turned 54 on 20 June 2026, so a magazine piece from March that called her 53 was correct on the morning it ran. HELLO! described the three of them as 62, 60 and 53 in a story dated 16 March 2026, and all three figures were accurate that day. Read an age without a date beside it and you are reading a number with an expiry it never declared.
The birth order also settles the mix-up that sends most people to this page. Tara and Alexander are full siblings from the Newley marriage; Katyana is their half-sister through Ron Kass. There is no fourth child, no stepchild folded into the total and no child from the marriages to Maxwell Reed or Peter Holm. If you have arrived from a list that says four, it has almost certainly counted a grandchild. For the same three-children-two-marriages shape handled the same way, the KidsCo guide to Lauren Bacall’s three children lays out an identical split between an early branch and a later one. Al Roker’s three children divide across two marriages on the same pattern, with one difference worth noting: his eldest joined the family by adoption in 1987 rather than by birth.
Who are the fathers of Joan Collins’ children?
Two men, and the paperwork is unusually clean. Collins married Anthony Newley in Norwalk, Connecticut on 27 May 1963, five months pregnant with Tara; the marriage produced Tara and Alexander and was dissolved on 13 August 1971, a divorce reported at the time by The New York Times. She married Ron Kass, the American record and film executive who had run Apple Records for the Beatles, on 11 March 1972, six months pregnant with Katyana. That marriage ended on 6 May 1983. Her first, fourth and fifth marriages, to Maxwell Reed, Peter Holm and Percy Gibson, produced no children.
| Person | Relationship | Publicly established point | Boundary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anthony Newley | Second husband, married 27 May 1963, divorced 13 August 1971 | Father of Tara and Alexander; died 14 April 1999, aged 67 | Newley had children by other partners; they are not Joan Collins’ children |
| Ron Kass | Third husband, married 11 March 1972, divorced 6 May 1983 | Father of Katyana; died 17 October 1986, aged 51 | Kass had three sons from an earlier marriage; they are Katyana’s half-brothers, not Collins’ children |
| Percy Gibson | Fifth husband, married 17 February 2002 at Claridge’s, London | Film producer; credited co-producer on the 2026 mystery A Murder Between Friends | No children with Joan Collins |
| Maxwell Reed and Peter Holm | First and fourth husbands | Neither marriage produced a child | Both are outside the family count entirely |
That two-branch structure is the single most useful thing to hold on to, because it explains why the siblings carry different surnames and why the age gaps look so wide. Nine years separate Tara from Katyana. It is the same pattern KidsCo maps in the guide to Michael Douglas’s three children, where an early marriage and a later one produce children who grew up in different decades and different countries. Attach every claim to a named father and the confusion disappears; attach it to the surname alone and Newley’s other children start drifting into the count. Kevin Costner’s seven children are mapped the same way, three branches kept apart rather than blurred into one running list of names.
Tara Newley Arkle, the eldest and the writer of the family
Tara was born in New York City on 12 October 1963 and educated across three institutions: The American College in Paris, where her poetry and journalism were first published, then Boston University, with literature study at Harvard. She spent the late 1980s and 1990s in front of a microphone rather than a camera, presenting for Capital Radio, LBC, Talk Radio and BBC Radio 5, and released music as well: she sang on the E-Zee Possee single “Breathing Is E-Zee”, a UK chart entry in 1991, and put out “Save Me from Myself” on ZTT in 1993. Columns and features followed for the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, OK! and The Sunday Times.
She married the writer Nicholas Gilador Arkle in 2016 and now works under the name Tara Newley Arkle. One claim attached to her in older listings deserves a straight answer: a 2020 debut novel titled Radio Honey is widely repeated, yet no catalogue record for it surfaces in the standard bibliographic databases that hold her brother’s two books under his ISBNs. The reader-proof move is the same one KidsCo uses everywhere: search a library catalogue by ISBN rather than by headline. What is solidly established is the broadcasting and byline record above, plus a screenplay, Graffiti Boy <3 Guerrilla Girl, that took first place at the Moondance International Film Festival in 2018.
Her most recent public appearance in the family record is a dated one and nothing more. In July 2025 Collins posted a holiday photograph from the south of France with Tara beside her, then 61. That establishes a mother and daughter on holiday on a particular week. It does not establish a job, an address or a state of mind, and this guide does not stretch it into one. Readers who like that distinction drawn clearly will recognise it from the KidsCo profile of Sir Patrick Stewart’s two children, where a long stage career sits beside two adults who publish very little.
Alexander “Sacha” Newley, the portrait painter who married in 2025
Alexander has the most heavily documented working life of the three, and the documentation is institutional rather than anecdotal. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds his full-length portrait of Nigel Hawthorne in character as King George III, painted in 1993 and accessioned on 7 October 2010 under museum number S.1303-2010. That is a permanent national collection record with a number you can look up, which is a far stronger form of evidence than a profile paragraph. His portraits of Gore Vidal and of Christopher Reeve sit in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington; KidsCo maps the Reeve household separately in its guide to Christopher Reeve’s three children.
Two books carry his name and both have catalogue entries. Unaccompanied Minor, a memoir of growing up between two famous parents, illustrated with 28 of his own paintings, was published by Quartet Books in 2017 under ISBN 9780704374461. Divining the Human: The Art of Alexander Newley was published by Unicorn under ISBN 9781913491444, catalogued with a first publication year of 2022 although several listings give 2023. Where two dates compete, the library record wins, because it is generated from the book itself rather than from a press cycle.
The newest fact on his page is a happy one and the current guide should carry it. Over the weekend of 27 and 28 September 2025 he married the American singer-songwriter Sheela Raman at a lakeside castle venue near Salzburg in Austria, and his mother, then 92, walked him down the aisle in a powder blue caped dress. One practical note for anyone trying to see his paintings: the artist domain that older articles still link to no longer resolves to his site, so the durable routes to the work are the V&A accession number and the two ISBNs above.
Katyana “Katy” Kass and the summer of 1980
Katyana Kennedy Kass was born on 20 June 1972 and is the only child of Collins’ marriage to Ron Kass. Six weeks after her eighth birthday, the family’s life changed on a specific, datable morning. Collins told the story in her own voice in the feature-length documentary This Is Joan Collins: “On August 1st 1980, I flew to Paris. The following day, the unthinkable happened. My daughter Katy had been in a terrible accident.” Katy had been knocked down by a car and sustained serious brain injuries. She was in a coma for 42 days. A mother deciding what of a family medical story belongs in public is the same judgement at work in Kim Kardashian and Ye’s four children, where the parent’s own medical history is on the record and the children’s is not.
What followed is on the record because her mother chose to put it there, first in the 1982 book Katy: A Fight for Life and then, four decades on, in the documentary. Collins described the moment Katy began making “little sounds”, then took her “first faltering steps”, and summed it up in a sentence that has followed her ever since: “Katy’s accident was the worst thing that ever happened to me.” The strain of that year, alongside Ron Kass’s worsening drinking and money troubles, ran the marriage aground; the divorce came through on 6 May 1983, Collins paid for his care when he became terminally ill, and he died on 17 October 1986.
KidsCo stops the story there, on purpose. A recovery from a childhood brain injury is not a public medical file, and an adult who has spent 46 years out of the spotlight is not an information gap. What is genuinely current, and genuinely warm, is small: on Mother’s Day 2026 Collins posted a rare photograph of the two of them with Percy Gibson and captioned it “What a lovely Mother’s day with my wonderful daughter and husband.” That is the whole of the present-tense record, and it is enough. The same restraint shapes the KidsCo guide to William Shatner’s three daughters, where three adult daughters are counted, dated and then left alone.
Joan Collins’ grandchildren: four names, and where the record stops
Collins has four grandchildren, and she named all four herself in an interview with HELLO! published on 23 March 2026: Miel, Weston, Ava and Deia. “I’m DJ to the grandkids,” she said in the same conversation. “I love to be with them and I pay them a lot of attention.” That interview is the strongest evidence available on the subject, because it is the grandmother speaking on the record on a known date, rather than a tally assembled from photo captions.
She did not attach each name to a branch of the family in that interview, and this guide does not guess. What is separately established is that Tara has two children, both now adults, and that Alexander has a daughter from his earlier marriage to Angela Tassoni. Beyond the four first names Collins published herself, KidsCo prints nothing: no ages, no birth dates, no schools, no towns, no social accounts and no predictions about what any of them will become. A grandparent naming her grandchildren in a magazine is a parent-led disclosure; everything past it would be ours, not theirs.
It is worth adding one number that often gets confused with the grandchildren count. Collins is also a godmother 15 times over, a role she has spoken about publicly and which has nothing to do with the family tree above. If a profile tells you she has 15 grandchildren, it has merged the two figures. For another screen legend whose adult children and grandchildren are counted precisely and then left in peace, see the KidsCo guide to Diane Keaton’s two children.
What the Collins family is doing in 2026
Collins turned 93 on 23 May 2026 and is still working, which matters here because most of the family news that reaches print arrives through her. In May 2026 she appeared at the 79th Cannes Film Festival and shared behind-the-scenes pictures from a film she has been shooting under the working titles The Bitter End and My Duchess, playing Wallis Simpson opposite Isabella Rossellini, Charles Dance and Laurent Lafitte. The Guardian announced the project on 30 January 2025, with Mike Newell directing and Louise Fennell writing, and quoted Collins saying she was “thrilled about the challenge of playing this iconic woman in a previously untold story.”
On 3 June 2026 she walked the UK premiere of the whodunnit A Murder Between Friends, co-produced by her husband Percy Gibson. Away from film, the role she describes as closest to her heart is charitable: she is vice-president of Shooting Star Children’s Hospices, has backed the charity since 2003, visits families at least once a year and became the first guest on its podcast in 2026. That is a current role stated by the person holding it, on a dated page, which is the standard this guide applies to every job claim below.
| Period | Verified record | Accurate wording on 20 August 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| 1993, acquired 2010 | V&A holds Alexander Newley’s portrait of Nigel Hawthorne as King George III, museum number S.1303-2010 | A permanent national museum holding, not a statement about his 2026 diary |
| 2017 | Unaccompanied Minor, Quartet Books, ISBN 9780704374461 | A published memoir with a catalogue record you can verify |
| 2022 | Divining the Human: The Art of Alexander Newley, Unicorn, ISBN 9781913491444 | A published art book; some retail listings date it 2023 |
| 27 to 28 September 2025 | Alexander married Sheela Raman near Salzburg, with Joan Collins walking him down the aisle | A dated family milestone, not a change to anyone’s occupation |
| 23 March 2026 | Collins states in her own words that she is vice-president of Shooting Star Children’s Hospices | A current charity role, sourced to a dated first-person interview |
| 3 June 2026 | UK premiere of A Murder Between Friends, co-produced by Percy Gibson | A dated credit for Gibson and a dated appearance for Collins |
What current Joan Collins profiles should correct
| Weak or harmful shortcut | Reader-first correction | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| “Tara, 61, Alexander, 59, and Katyana, 53” | On 20 August 2026 they are 62, 60 and 54, and Alexander turns 61 on 8 September 2026 | Hard-coded ages rot silently; a birth date plus a check date never does |
| “Katy was hurt in an accident as a little girl” | She was knocked down by a car on 2 August 1980, six weeks after turning eight, and spent 42 days in a coma | The dated version is both more accurate and more respectful than a vague one |
| Treating a family photograph as a career update | A holiday picture or a Mother’s Day post establishes a dated appearance and nothing else | It is how invented jobs and fake job titles enter search results |
| Linking readers to the artist’s old personal domain | That address no longer resolves to his site; use V&A museum number S.1303-2010 and the two ISBNs | Dead links send readers to parked domains instead of the actual work |
| “Joan Collins has 15 grandchildren” | She has four grandchildren, Miel, Weston, Ava and Deia, and is a godmother 15 times over | Two different numbers, two different relationships, routinely merged |
| Calling This Is Joan Collins simply a BBC film | It is a feature-length TCM documentary that the BBC broadcast and carried on iPlayer | Both descriptions circulate; naming the producer and the broadcaster settles it |
None of those corrections requires new reporting. Each one is a matter of pinning a claim to a date, a number or a named institution, and every correction in the table above is carried by a source in the list at the foot of this page. That is also the test to apply to any other profile you read on this family: if it gives you an age with no date, a job with no employer and a photograph with no caption date, it is telling you how things were, not how they are.
Joan Collins family timeline
Two tables, because the family divides neatly into a founding decade and a modern one. The first covers the marriages and births that created the three-child structure. The second covers the events that shaped it afterwards, including the one date every serious profile of this family has to get right.
| Date | Milestone | What it establishes |
|---|---|---|
| 27 May 1963 | Collins marries Anthony Newley in Norwalk, Connecticut | Opens the Newley branch of the family |
| 12 October 1963 | Tara Cynara Newley born in New York City | Eldest child, exact date |
| 8 September 1965 | Alexander Anthony Newley born in New York City | Second child, exact date |
| 13 August 1971 | The Newley divorce is finalised | Closes the second marriage |
| 11 March 1972 | Collins marries Ron Kass | Opens the Kass branch |
| 20 June 1972 | Katyana Kennedy Kass born | Youngest child, exact date |
| Date | Milestone | What it establishes |
|---|---|---|
| 2 August 1980 | Katy, then eight, is knocked down by a car and spends 42 days in a coma | The single dated event that reshaped the household |
| 6 May 1983 | Collins and Ron Kass divorce | Closes the third marriage; the two stayed close |
| 14 April 1999 | Anthony Newley dies aged 67 | Tara and Alexander’s father’s death |
| 17 February 2002 | Collins marries Percy Gibson at Claridge’s in London | Fifth marriage, no children |
| 2015 New Year Honours | Joan Henrietta Collins OBE appointed DBE, cited as philanthropist and charity campaigner, for services to charity | The damehood, taken from the official Diplomatic Service and Overseas List |
| 23 March 2026 | Collins names her four grandchildren in a published interview | The current, sourced grandchild count |
Questions people ask about Joan Collins’ children
How many children does Joan Collins have?
Three. Tara Newley and Alexander Newley are her children with her second husband, Anthony Newley, and Katyana Kass is her daughter with her third husband, Ron Kass. Her marriages to Maxwell Reed, Peter Holm and Percy Gibson produced no children.
What are the birth dates of Joan Collins’ children?
Tara Cynara Newley was born on 12 October 1963 in New York City. Alexander Anthony Newley was born on 8 September 1965, also in New York City. Katyana Kennedy Kass was born on 20 June 1972.
How old are Tara, Alexander and Katyana in 2026?
On 20 August 2026 Tara is 62, Alexander is 60 and Katyana is 54. Alexander turns 61 on 8 September 2026 and Tara turns 63 on 12 October 2026, which is why autumn profiles show different numbers.
Who are the fathers of Joan Collins’ children?
Anthony Newley, the singer, songwriter and actor she married on 27 May 1963, is the father of Tara and Alexander. Ron Kass, the record and film executive she married on 11 March 1972, is the father of Katyana.
What happened to Joan Collins’ daughter Katyana?
On 2 August 1980, aged eight, Katy was knocked down by a car, sustained serious brain injuries and spent 42 days in a coma. She recovered. Collins wrote about it in her 1982 book Katy: A Fight for Life and in her documentary.
How many grandchildren does Joan Collins have?
Four. She named them herself in a March 2026 interview: Miel, Weston, Ava and Deia. She is separately a godmother 15 times over, which is a different figure and is often confused with the grandchild count.
Sources and further reading
- UK Government: 2015 New Year Honours Diplomatic Service and Overseas List naming Joan Henrietta Collins OBE as DBE for services to charity.
- GOV.UK: the official New Year Honours 2015 publication page and its full award lists.
- Victoria and Albert Museum: Alexander Newley portrait of Nigel Hawthorne as King George III, museum number S.1303-2010.
- The Guardian: 2023 interview naming all three children and both father branches in Collins’ own account.
- The Guardian: January 2025 announcement of the Wallis Simpson film, its director, writer and Collins’ own quote.
- HELLO!: March 2026 exclusive in which Collins names her four grandchildren and her Shooting Star vice-presidency.
- HELLO!: March 2026 report giving the three children’s ages as 62, 60 and 53 on a stated date.
- HELLO!: September 2025 coverage of Alexander Newley’s marriage to Sheela Raman near Salzburg.
- HELLO!: May 2026 report on the Wallis Simpson shoot, its cast and Collins’ Cannes appearance.
- Metro: Collins’ verbatim account of 1 and 2 August 1980 and Katyana’s injuries, from the documentary.
- Open Library: catalogue record for Unaccompanied Minor by Alexander Newley, Quartet Books 2017.
- Open Library: catalogue record for Katy: A Fight for Life by Joan Collins, first published 1982.
- The New York Times: contemporaneous report of the Newley divorce dated 14 August 1971.
- Chicago Tribune: February 2002 report of the Claridge’s wedding to Percy Gibson.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica: reference biography confirming Collins’ birth date of 23 May 1933.
