Star says she looks forward to playing the last days of ‘this iconic woman’ for whom Edward VIII abdicated the throne

Joan Collins is to play Wallis Simpson in a new biopic focusing on the US socialite’s final years.

The film, currently titled The Bitter End (and previously known as In Bed with the Duchess), will be directed by Four Weddings and a Funeral’s Mike Newell and depict the last years of Simpson, who died in Paris in 1986, aged 89.