Background and career
Jacqueline Jill Collins (4 October 1937 – 19 September 2015) was an English romance novelist and actress. She moved to Los Angeles in 1985 and spent most of her career there. She wrote 32 novels, all of which appeared 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 have been adapted for the screen, either as films or television miniseries. She was the younger sister of Joan Collins.
Collins was born on 4 October 1937, in Hampstead, London, the younger daughter of Elsa (née Bessant) Collins (died 1962) and Joseph William Collins (died 1988), a theatrical agent whose clients later included Shirley Bassey, the Beatles, and Tom Jones. Collins's South African-born father was Jewish, and her British mother was Anglican. A middle child, Collins had an elder sister, Joan Collins (actress and author), and a younger brother, Bill (who became a property agent). Collins attended Francis Holland School, an independent day school for girls in London and was expelled at age 15. During this period, she reportedly had a brief affair with 29-year-old Marlon Brando.
In 1956, Collins visited her older sister, Joan, who was then based in Los Angeles. She returned to London after failing to gain a U.S. work permit to enable her to be groomed for stardom at 20th Century Fox. Collins began appearing in acting roles in a series of British B movies. 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), in which she was credited as Lynn Curtis. After minor appearances in such television series as Danger Man and The Saint, Collins gave up on pursuing an acting career, although she did play briefly on the television series Minder in 1980. Her first book, The World Is Full of Married Men (1968), became a best-seller. Four decades later, she admitted she was a "school dropout" and "juvenile delinquent" when she was 15: "I'm glad I got all of that out of my system at an early age," she said, adding that she "never pretended to be a literary writer."
Collins later said that she always wanted to write, not act. By the age of 13 classmates paid to listen to sex scenes she wrote. Collins began many works of fiction but abandoned them, and only completed her first novel after being persuaded to do so by her second husband Oscar Lerman. "You're a storyteller", he told her. After the publication of her first novel The World Is Full of Married Men, romantic novelist Barbara Cartland called the book "nasty, filthy and disgusting", and charged Collins with "creating every pervert in Britain". The book was banned in Australia and South Africa, but the scandal bolstered sales in the United States and the UK. Her second novel, The Stud, was published in 1969. It also made the best-seller lists.
By the 1970s Collins was a peer of successful male airport novel authors like Sidney Sheldon and Harold Robbins.. Her third novel, Sunday Simmons & Charlie Brick (first published under the title The Hollywood Zoo in the UK and then retitled Sinners worldwide in 1984) was published in 1971 and again made the best-seller lists. This was Collins's first novel to be set in the United States. Lovehead followed in 1974 (retitled as The Love Killers in 1989). This novel was Collins's first foray into the world of organized crime, a genre that would later prove to be extremely successful for her. Following this, Collins published The World Is Full of Divorced Women (unrelated to her first novel) in 1975, and then Lovers & Gamblers in 1977, which told the story of rock/soul superstar Al King. In the late 1970s, Collins made a foray into 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. Following 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 (not based on any of her novels) for the film Yesterday's Hero (1979).
In the 1980s, Collins and her family moved to Los Angeles on a full-time basis, where she would continue 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 collected the knowledge and experience to write her most commercially successful novel, Hollywood Wives (1983), which hit The New York Times best-seller list at number one. Marketed as a "scandalous exposé", the novel sold over 15 million copies and placed Collins in a powerful position, making her a celebrity of near equal status to her sister Joan, whose own career had taken an upwards direction with her role in the television drama Dynasty. In 1985, Hollywood Wives was made 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 stated that she was never consulted during production and that she did not agree with some of the casting choices. She then went on to write the sequel to Chances, titled Lucky (1985), followed by Hollywood Husbands (1986) and Rock Star (1988).
