- His great-grandfather was physician to King William IV.
- He owned a house in the South of France which he often rented out to other writers for summer holidays. However, he would also check the house out carefully for any minor damage or alteration caused by these tenants, and often proved extremely litigious.
- In 1945, he and Christopher Isherwood, both British and with a literary career outside of movie work, were employed at Warner Brothers and had adjoining offices in the Writers' Building. Both stoutly maintained that the British General Election, the first one since the start of the war, would be won by the Labour Party, whereas their American colleagues sentimentally assumed that the popularity of wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill would guarantee a victory for the Conservatives. In the event, Labour won by a landslide, and both Collier and Isherwood won a tidy amount of money by having made wagers with these other writers.
- He wrote the first version of the screenplay for "The African Queen", over a dozen years before the eventual film directed by John Huston was released. Collier claimed he had brought C.S. Forester's novel to the attention of Warner Brothers as a likely vehicle for the studio's top female star, Bette Davis. (Apparently, David Niven was suggested for the male lead). However, the necessity of extensive location filming in Africa and the likelihood of a war in Europe both put Jack L. Warner off the idea; he was reminded that Davis had the right to pick her film vehicles from any property the studio owned, and so wanted to sell his newly-acquired film rights to the book as quickly as possible. He sold the rights to Collier himself, who later claimed he "bought them for a song and then sold them again for the equivalent of a grand opera" - however, Collier had nothing to do with the eventual classic movie of 1951.
- Charlton Heston wrote feelingly in his work journals (eventually published) about how difficult it was to get Collier to work with any speed on the screenplay of "The War Lord", although he praised the eventual results. Collier, in turn, insisted that his work on the film had been ruined by insensitive rewrites by others, and he never had any subsequent screenwriting credits.
- He claimed that, when he worked on his first film script (for "Sylvia Scarlett" in 1935), he was in, in his own words, "abysmally ignorant of the cinema", having seen "scarcely a dozen films" in his entire life.
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