Jackie Collins

Jackie Collins (4 October 1937 – 19 September 2015) was a British-American novelist who sold over 500 million copies of her thirty-two novels worldwide, making her one of the best-selling fiction writers in history. She created the modern Hollywood blockbuster novel — a genre of glamorous, sexually explicit, female-driven popular fiction in which powerful women navigate worlds of wealth, ambition, and desire with the same swagger traditionally reserved for male protagonists. Her Lucky Santangelo series and Hollywood Wives (1983) defined the form and were imitated endlessly but never matched.

Life

Collins was born in London, the younger sister of the actress Joan Collins. She was expelled from school at fifteen for truancy and sexual precocity, moved to Los Angeles as a teenager, and immersed herself in the Hollywood social scene that would become her primary subject matter. She married twice — to Wallace Austin (who died of a drug overdose) and to Oscar Lerman, a nightclub owner and the love of her life, who died of cancer in 1992.

She lived in Beverly Hills for most of her adult life and was a fixture of Hollywood social life — not as a hanger-on but as a genuine insider whose friends, enemies, and acquaintances provided the raw material for her fiction. She was also a deeply private person who kept her 2015 diagnosis of stage four breast cancer secret from everyone except her sister, revealing it publicly only two weeks before her death.

The Novels

Collins’s first novel, The World Is Full of Married Men (1968), was banned in Australia and South Africa for its explicit sexual content — a controversy that established her commercial template. The Stud (1969) and The Bitch (1979) followed, both adapted into films starring Joan Collins.

The breakthrough was Chances (1981), which introduced Lucky Santangelo — the daughter of a Mafia boss who refuses to be confined to the role of wife and mother, instead building her own criminal and business empire. Lucky is Collins’s greatest creation: fierce, sexual, intelligent, and operating in a world of men without apology or compromise.

Hollywood Wives (1983) became a massive bestseller and a cultural phenomenon — a satirical, encyclopaedic portrait of Hollywood as a system of power, sex, and money in which wives are simultaneously essential and expendable. The book’s success spawned sequels and a television miniseries.

Collins continued the Lucky Santangelo saga through Lucky (1985), Lady Boss (1990), Vendetta: Lucky’s Revenge (1997), Dangerous Kiss (1999), Drop Dead Beautiful (2007), Goddess of Vengeance (2012), and The Santangelos (2015), her final novel.

What Collins Actually Did

Collins’s literary achievement is more substantial than critics have traditionally acknowledged. She created a form of popular fiction that centred female desire — sexual, financial, and political — at a time when mainstream publishing regarded women’s ambition as either a problem or a punchline. Her heroines are not passive objects of male desire; they are agents of their own stories, pursuing power with the same ruthlessness as their male counterparts.

Her prose is fast, blunt, and efficient — she wrote as if there were no time for indirection, and her pacing is relentless. She knew Hollywood from the inside, and her satire of its social rituals, power dynamics, and sexual economy is more accurate than most “serious” fiction about the entertainment industry.

Critical Standing

Collins was never taken seriously by literary critics, and she did not seek their approval. Her audience — overwhelmingly female, cross-generational, and international — was sufficient validation. She was a feminist in practice if not always in rhetoric: she created powerful female characters, controlled her own publishing career with formidable business acumen, and refused to apologise for writing about sex from a woman’s perspective.

Her influence on popular fiction is immense: the entire genre of “glam” or “bonkbuster” fiction — from Danielle Steel to Sidney Sheldon to the contemporary romance industry — owes a significant debt to Collins’s template.

Collecting Collins

The World Is Full of Married Men (1968, W. H. Allen) in first edition brings $100–$300 — the banned first novel is the most collected title. Hollywood Wives (1983, Simon & Schuster) firsts are $30–$80. The Lucky Santangelo novels are modestly priced. Collins’s enormous print runs mean that copies are abundant, but signed first editions command premiums. She was a generous signer at events.