“I swim lengths in the pool at the end of each day - thinking about my characters and what they might do next,” she told the Wall Street Journal last year. Few were regarded as having a closer acquaintance with the often-tawdry reality behind the glossy image, with the links between bedrooms and boardrooms, and with the sometimes drug-addled lives that were hidden from the prying eyes of the public.įrom what she would tell interviewers, it appeared that her characters themselves would at times guide her pen. The more her books sold, the greater her fame grew, and the greater became her access to the milieus about which she wrote. Her last book, “The Santangelos,” was published this year. Its patriarch, Gino, and his “dangerously beautiful” daughter, Lucky, were the central figures. Collins did not restrict her novelist’s eye to her immediate surroundings and was known for books about a family she called the Santangelos, with roots in organized crime. Collins the Order of the British Empire for services to fiction and to charity.Īlthough she had spent years living in an elegantly appointed Southern California mansion, Ms. However, in 2013, Queen Elizabeth II awarded Ms. Her first book was said to have been labeled disgusting filth by no less a literary arbiter than famed romance novelist Barbara Cartland. Collins experienced the evolution of critical and popular tastes and tolerance.

Jackie Collins, in 1968, holds her first book “The World Is Full of Married Men.” (Bob Dear/AP) Collins had made something of a splash long before that, with the appearance in 1968 of her first published novel, “The World is Full of Married Men.” A blend of show business and monkey business, it created the template for much of her later work. Many of her books became feature films and TV movies.

Among the novels was “Hollywood Wives” (1983), whose characters seemed to be thinly disguised and dismayingly flawed versions of real-life figures.įrom then on, her work came to symbolize the fictional re-creation of the lives of Hollywood’s handsome and haunted as they navigated an environment of raw ambition and ravenous hunger for success and sexual conquest.

Collins set many of them in the film capital in which she was herself a prominent figure. Over a career in which more than 500 million copies of her books were sold, Ms. The family included older sister Joan Collins, the actress known for her work on the TV series “Dynasty.” Collins’s Web site, her three daughters said she died of breast cancer. Jackie Collins, the best-selling British-born author whose dozens of racy, page-turning novels chronicled the glitz - along with the sex, schemes and seductions - of the rich and the rapacious, died Sept.

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