Photo

Jackie Collins, left, with her sister, the actress Joan Collins, at the 2009 Vanity Fair Oscar party in West Hollywood, Calif. Credit Evan Agostini/Associated Press

Jackie Collins, the best-selling British-born author known for her vibrant novels about the extravagance and glamour of life in Hollywood, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. She was 77.

The cause was breast cancer, her family said in a statement.

Long before the emergence of the “Fifty Shades of Grey” franchise, Ms. 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.

Ms. Collins, the younger sister of the 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 Ms. Collins’s “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, the critic Janet Maslin d...�s 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 Ms. Collins’s novels became fodder for movies and television mini-series. In 2001, for instance, 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 found to have stage-four breast cancer in 2007, according to People magazine’s website, 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,” Ms. 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.”

Photo

Ms. Collins with a copy of her first book in 1968. Credit Bob Dear/Associated Press

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.

Continue reading the main story

Loved Hollywood Wives, but gave up on her after that. RIP

RIP

She's the author that got me hooked on reading as a child, I used to sneak and read my grandmom's copies of all her books. My favorite was Rock Star, RIP Jackie

Abdul said:

She's the author that got me hooked on reading as a child, I used to sneak and read my grandmom's copies of all her books. My favorite was Rock Star, RIP Jackie

I was going to mention Rock Star--she was a guilty pleasure back in the day. Who's going to write trashy Hollywood novels now? RIP Ms. Collins.

purplethunder3121 said:

Abdul said:

She's the author that got me hooked on reading as a child, I used to sneak and read my grandmom's copies of all her books. My favorite was Rock Star, RIP Jackie

I was going to mention Rock Star--she was a guilty pleasure back in the day. Who's going to write trashy Hollywood novels now? RIP Ms. Collins.

Good question, She'll be a hard act to follow

Wow...These Major Celebs continue to leave us left & right...My Favorite Collins Book-to-TV Movie is "Lucky"...Even though Jackie was a school drop-out she had an Amazing imagination and could make it come to Life from paper to Live-action..Like her sister Joan she was always real..Very RICH but very Real...Her Legacy in the Literary World is FOREVER and will outlive us all...RIP OL'girl..