Jackie Collins, the best-selling British-born author known for her vibrant novels about the extravagance and glamor of life in Hollywood, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. She was 77.
The cause was breast cancer, her family said in a statement.
“It is with tremendous sadness that we announce the death of our beautiful, dynamic and one of a kind mother, Jackie Collins, who died of breast cancer today,” the Collins family said.
“She was a true inspiration, a trail blazer for women in fiction and a creative force. She will live on through her characters, but we already miss her beyond words,” they said.
Long before the emergence of the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise, Collins dominated the publishing industry’s more lascivious corners.
She wrote more than 30 books, many of them filled with explicit, unrestrained sexuality, and sold more than 500 million copies worldwide.
Her first novel, The World Is Full of Married Men, was published in 1968. Australia and South Africa banned it because of its frank depiction of extramarital sex. Other earlier works included The Stud in 1969 and Rock Star in 1988.
Collins, the younger sister of actress Joan Collins, wrote her books in longhand on either white printer paper or yellow legal pads, regularly churning out prodigious numbers of pages.
Writing in the New York Times in 1993, Barry Gewen said of Collins’ American Star: A Love Story that it might more appropriately be titled “Coming Up for Air.” In 2006, reviewing her Lovers & Players in the Times, critic Janet Maslin described Collins’ writing as “crypto-celebrity gamesmanship” in which the author “maneuvers her characters through a story as if she were playing by a strict set of rules.”
Many of Collins’ novels became fodder for movies and television miniseries.
In 2001, she published Hollywood Wives: The New Generation, which followed Hollywood Wives, Hollywood Husbands, Hollywood Kids and Hollywood Divorces. It became a New York Times best-seller and in 2003 was made into a TV movie starring Farrah Fawcett, Robin Givens, Jack Scalia and Melissa Gilbert.
She was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer in 2007, according to People magazine’s Web site and had written five books since then.
Her latest 600-plus-page novel, The Santangelos, was published in June.
In an interview in 2007 with the New York Times magazine that coincided with the publication of her 25th book, Drop Dead Beautiful, Collins said she did not care what reviewers would say about it.
“I never pretended to be a literary writer,” she said. “I’m a school dropout.”
She said in the interview that she did not feel that the increasingly explicit nature of pop culture made her fiction seem quaint.
“Fifteen-year-old girls still read my novels under the bedcovers with a flashlight,” she said.
“But it’s true that I published my first novel in 1968, when no one was writing about sex except Philip Roth,” she said.
Jacqueline Jill “Jackie” Collins was born on Oct. 4, 1937, in London. Survivors include her three daughters, Tracy, Tiffany and Rory and her sister, Joan.
Collins’ first husband, Oscar Lerman, died of cancer in 1992 after the couple had been married for 27 years. Four years later, her fiance Frank Calcagnini died of brain cancer.
In addition to her romance novels, Collins wrote The Lucky Santangelo Cookbook, which was published last year and takes its name from a series she wrote that focused on an Italian-American family with gangster roots.
Beyond The Santangelos, those titles included Vendetta: Lucky’s Revenge (1996), Dangerous Kiss, Goddess of Vengeance (2011) and Confessions of a Wild Child (2013).
Using the voice of fictional British movie spy Austin Powers, Times critic Michiko Kakutani wrote in a review of Dangerous Kiss that the main character, Lucky, “is pretty shagadelic herself, one smashing baby, baby.”
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS