Jackie Collins

Jackie Collins (born October 4, 1937, London, England—died September 19, 2015, Los Angeles, California) was an English author known for her provocative romantic thrillers, which were liberally salted with sex, crime, and entertainment-industry gossip. Collins’s glamorous public persona—she frequently appeared in leopard-print clothing and was adorned with expensive jewelry—echoed the lavish lifestyles of many of her characters. She sold more than 400 million copies of her books.

Collins, the middle child of a theatrical agent and a former dancer, was raised in London. After her constant misbehaviour led to her expulsion from an exclusive day school at age 15, she moved to Hollywood to live with her elder sister, actress Joan Collins. She returned to London following a yearlong interlude of partying with Joan’s film-industry friends. When her sporadic appearances in television productions and films during the 1950s and early ’60s failed to coalesce into an acting career, Collins turned instead to writing. At the urging of her second husband (her first marriage had ended in divorce nearly a decade earlier), she completed a half-formed novel about an affair between a married advertising executive and an aspiring actress. The resulting romp, The World Is Full of Married Men (1968; film 1979), became a succès de scandale as a result of its frank depictions of extramarital sex. It was banned in Australia and South Africa.

Along with such writers as Jacqueline Susann (whose Valley of the Dolls was published in 1966), Collins was at the vanguard of a movement in female-oriented fiction that eschewed the chaste romance conventions established by Barbara Cartland and her ilk in favour of a less-euphemistic, more-uninhibited approach to sexuality. Collins’s next effort, The Stud (1969; film 1978), chronicles the exploits of a licentious London nightclub manager and his nominally married female employer. She picked up their torrid saga in The Bitch (1979; film 1979). The film versions of The Stud and The Bitch were vehicles for her sister Joan. Collins first mined the corruptions of Hollywood for material in Sunday Simmons and Charlie Brick (1971; reissued as The Hollywood Zoo [1975] and Sinners [1984]); her preoccupation with the entertainment industry was also evident in The World Is Full of Divorced Women (1975) and Lovers and Gamblers (1977).

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In 1980 Collins moved to Los Angeles with her husband and children. Her next book, Chances (1981), cut between New York City and Las Vegas and featured mobster’s daughter Lucky Santangelo. Though lacquered with Collins’s proprietary blend of sex and glamour, the plot was bolstered by its steely heroine and gritty depictions of organized crime. The formula struck a chord with readers, and Collins expanded the story of Santangelo and her family in several volumes, including Lucky (1985; filmed for television, with Chances, as Lucky Chances, 1990), Lady Boss (1990; television film 1992), Vendetta: Lucky’s Revenge (1996), Dangerous Kiss (1999), Drop Dead Beautiful (2007), Goddess of Vengeance (2011), Confessions of a Wild Child: Lucky, the Early Years (2014), and The Santangelos (2015).

Collins variously hyperbolized and veiled the prurient insights she had gained from rubbing shoulders with Tinseltown elite in Hollywood Wives (1983; television miniseries 1985) and its various indirect sequels, which included Hollywood Husbands (1986), Hollywood Kids (1994), and Hollywood Divorces (2003). In The Power Trip (2013) an entertainment-industry debauch aboard a yacht is interrupted by Somali pirates. She debuted a rewritten version of The Bitch, available solely in e-book format, in 2012. Although Collins had held dual U.S.-British citizenship since 1960 and had lived in Los Angeles since the early 1980s, she was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2013. The documentary Lady Boss: The Jackie Collins Story appeared in 2021.