Jacqueline Jill Collins was born on October 4, 1937, and passed away on September 19, 2015. She was an English writer of romance novels and an actress. In 1985, she moved to Los Angeles, where she worked for most of her career. She wrote 32 novels, and all of them were on the New York Times Best Seller list. Her books have sold more than 500 million copies and have been translated into 40 languages. Eight of her novels were made into movies or TV miniseries. She was the younger sister of Joan Collins.
Early life
Collins was born on October 4, 1937, in Hampstead, London. She was the younger daughter of Elsa (née Bessant) Collins (died 1962) and Joseph William Collins (died 1988), a theatrical agent who later represented Shirley Bassey, the Beatles, and Tom Jones.
Collins's father was born in South Africa and was Jewish, while her mother was British and practiced the Anglican religion. Collins was the middle child, with an older sister named Joan Collins (an actress and author) and a younger brother named Bill (who later became a property agent).
Collins attended Francis Holland School, a private school for girls in London that students attend during the day. She was expelled from school at age 15. During this time, it was reported that she had a short romantic relationship with 29-year-old Marlon Brando.
Early career
In 1956, Collins visited her older sister, Joan, who was living in Los Angeles at the time. Collins returned to London after being unable to obtain a U.S. work permit, which would have allowed her to be trained for a career in acting at 20th Century Fox. She began working in acting roles in a series of British low-budget films. These included They Never Learn (1956), Barnacle Bill (1957), Rock You Sinners (1957), The Safecracker (1958), Intent to Kill (1958), Passport to Shame (1958), and The Shakedown (1960), where she was listed as Lynn Curtis. Collins had small roles in television shows such as Danger Man and The Saint, but she eventually stopped pursuing an acting career. She later appeared briefly in the television series Minder in 1980.
Her first book, The World Is Full of Married Men (1968), became a best-selling book. Forty years later, she admitted that she was a "school dropout" and "juvenile delinquent" when she was 15. She said, "I'm glad I got all of that out of my system at an early age," and added that she "never pretended to be a literary writer."
Writing career
Collins later said she always wanted to write, not act. By the age of 13, classmates paid to listen to sex scenes she wrote. Collins began many fiction works but abandoned them. She only finished her first novel after her second husband, Oscar Lerman, encouraged her. "You're a storyteller," he told her. After her first novel, The World Is Full of Married Men, was published, romantic novelist Barbara Cartland called the book "nasty, filthy, and disgusting" and accused Collins of "creating every pervert in Britain." The book was banned in Australia and South Africa, but the controversy increased sales in the United States and the UK.
Her second novel, The Stud, was published in 1969. It also became a best-seller.
By the 1970s, Collins was compared to successful male authors who wrote airport novels, such as Sidney Sheldon and Harold Robbins. Her third novel, Sunday Simmons & Charlie Brick (first published in the UK as The Hollywood Zoo and later retitled Sinners worldwide in 1984), was published in 1971 and again became a best-seller. This was Collins’s first novel set in the United States.
Lovehead followed in 1974 (retitled The Love Killers in 1989). This novel marked Collins’s first writing about organized crime, a genre that later became very successful for her.
In 1975, Collins published The World Is Full of Divorced Women (unrelated to her first novel), and in 1977, she wrote Lovers & Gamblers, which told the story of rock/soul superstar Al King.
In the late 1970s, Collins began writing for the screen. She co-wrote the screenplay for The Stud (1978), based on her second book; the film starred her older sister Joan as the gold-digging adulteress Fontaine Khaled. After this, Collins wrote the screenplay for The World Is Full of Married Men (1980), the film adaptation of her first novel. She also released her seventh novel, The Bitch (1979), a sequel to The Stud. The Bitch was also made into a successful 1979 film, with Joan Collins reprising the role. Around the same time, Collins wrote an original screenplay for the film Yesterday's Hero (1979).
In the 1980s, Collins and her family moved to Los Angeles, where she continued to write about the "rich and famous." She said, "If you wish to be successful, there is a place you should be at a certain time. And Los Angeles in the 1980s was it."
Her next novel was Chances (1981). It introduced one of her best-known characters, Lucky Santangelo, the "dangerously beautiful" daughter of a gangster.
While living in the hills above Sunset Boulevard, Collins gathered knowledge and experience to write her most commercially successful novel, Hollywood Wives (1983), which reached number one on The New York Times best-seller list. Marketed as a "scandalous exposé," the novel sold over 15 million copies and made Collins a celebrity nearly equal to her sister Joan, whose career had grown with her role in the television drama Dynasty.
In 1985, Hollywood Wives was adapted into a television miniseries, produced by Aaron Spelling and starring Candice Bergen, Stefanie Powers, Angie Dickinson, Anthony Hopkins, Suzanne Somers, and Rod Steiger. Although credited as a "creative consultant," Collins later said she was not consulted during production and disagreed with some casting choices.
She then wrote the sequel to Chances, titled Lucky (1985), followed by Hollywood Husbands (1986) and Rock Star (1988).
In 1990, Collins published her third Lucky Santangelo novel, Lady Boss, and wrote and co-produced the television miniseries Lucky Chances, which combined her first two Lucky Santangelo novels and starred Nicollette Sheridan (in the lead role) and Sandra Bullock.
In 1992, Collins became a widow when her husband of 26 years, Oscar Lerman, died of cancer. Around this time, she wrote and produced another miniseries based on the Lady Boss novel, with Kim Delaney playing the lead role. Her run of best-sellers continued with American Star (1993), Hollywood Kids (1994), and the fourth Santangelo novel, Vendetta: Lucky's Revenge (1996).
She was the subject of This Is Your Life in 1993, when she was surprised by Michael Aspel. By 1993, her books had sold over 170 million copies in 30 countries.
In 1998, Collins tried talk show television with the series Jackie Collins' Hollywood, but it was not successful. She also published the novel Thrill (1998) and wrote a four-part series of mini-novels, L.A. Connections, released in a newspaper every six weeks. This series introduced a new heroine, investigative journalist Madison Castelli. The fifth Lucky Santangelo novel, Dangerous Kiss, was published in 1999.
The 2000s were Collins’s busiest time; she published eight best-sellers, more than in any other decade of her career. In 2000, Collins brought back the character of Madison Castelli in a new novel, Lethal Seduction. In 2001, she published Hollywood Wives: The New Generation, which was adapted as a 2003 television movie starring Farrah Fawcett, Melissa Gilbert, and Robin Givens. (Collins was credited as an executive producer.) A new Madison Castelli novel, Deadly Embrace, was published in 2002, and Hollywood Divorces was published in 2003. In 2004, Collins hosted a series of television specials, Jackie Collins Presents, for E! Entertainment Television.
Collins continued with Lovers & Players (2006); the sixth Lucky Santangelo novel, Drop Dead Beautiful (2007); and
Personal life
Collins had dual citizenship: British by birth and American by naturalization, which she obtained on May 6, 1960. She married her first husband, Wallace Austin, in 1960. They divorced in 1964. Austin's use of prescription drugs for manic depression led to their separation. He died from a deliberate overdose the year after their marriage ended. The couple had one daughter, Tracy, born in 1961.
In 1965, Collins married again to Oscar Lerman, an American who owned art galleries and nightclubs called Ad-Lib and Tramp. Lerman was 18 years older than Collins. Their wedding took place at the home of Collins’s sister, Joan, and Joan’s husband, Anthony Newley. Collins and Lerman had two daughters: Tiffany, born in 1967, and Rory, born in 1969. Lerman also officially adopted Collins’s daughter, Tracy, from her previous marriage. Lerman died in 1992 from prostate cancer.
In 1994, Collins became engaged to Frank Calcagnini, a Los Angeles business executive. He died in 1998 from a brain tumor. She said that she coped with the loss of two loved ones by "celebrating their lives, as opposed to dwelling on their deaths."
In 2011, when asked if she was dating anyone, Collins said: "I have a man for every occasion," adding:
"When I was a kid growing up, I used to read my father's Playboy and I'd see these guys and they had fantastic apartments and cars. I have all of that now. Why would I want to hook myself up with one man when I've had two fantastic men in my life? One was my husband for over 20 years and one was my fiancé for six years."
She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2013 Birthday Honours for her work in fiction and charity.
Throughout her career, Collins intentionally promoted a flamboyant public image to market her books and protect her private life. She said she had only used Botox once ("I hated it") and avoided salons and buying new clothes. Her hobbies included watching television (she owned four TiVos) and using social media. Collins used parts of her personal life as inspiration for her novels. She said she loved Los Angeles and recalled reading novels by authors such as Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler while growing up in England. Dominick Dunne wrote that Collins "loved the picture business, the television business, the record business, and the people in them, the stars, celebrities, directors, and producers." Although she was a "great partygoer," he said she attended events "more as an observer than participant," using them for research. "Write about what you know," Collins said at a writer’s conference. "I love what I do. I fall in love with my characters. They become me, and I become them."
Death
Collins passed away from breast cancer in Los Angeles on September 19, 2015, at the age of 77. She was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer more than six years before her death but kept her illness private. She told her sister, Joan Collins, two weeks before she died and traveled from Los Angeles to London nine days before her death to appear on the ITV chat show Loose Women.