British-born author of Hollywood Wives and The Stud dies in Los Angeles of breast cancer which she had kept secret for more than six years

Jackie Collins: Queen of the bonkbuster | interview Read more

Jackie Collins, queen of the “bonkbuster” novel for more than four decades, has died aged 77 of breast cancer having kept her illness secret from all but her closest family and friends.

The British-born author, whose 32 books on glamour, sex and affairs in Hollywood were international bestsellers, died in Los Angeles on Saturday after being first diagnosed more than six years ago.



Her older sister, actor Dame Joan Collins, 82, said she was completely devastated. In an emotional tribute the writer’s three daughters said she had broken new ground for female writers in fiction.



Coming to writing after a career as an actor, her racy novels included Hollywood Lives, The Stud and The Bitch, all of them making the New York Times bestseller list.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With Joan Collins in 2009. Photograph: Evan Agostini/AP

She went public with her illness just six days before her death, in an interview with the US magazine People, which has yet to be published in full. The magazine said she had only told her sister in the last fortnight.

Joan posted a picture of herself and her sister, writing: “Farewell to my beautiful brave baby sister. I will love you and miss you forever. Rest in peace.”

A statement from Collins’ daughters said: “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. She lived a wonderfully full life and was adored by her family, friends and the millions of readers who she has been entertaining over four decades. 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”.

Tributes poured in for the author, who was made an OBE in 2013, and who sold more than 500m books translated into 40 languages.



Jackie Collins: a life in pictures Read more

In her last interview, with People magazine on 14 September at her Beverly Hills home, she said she had no regrets about the decision to keep her cancer private. “Looking back, I’m not sorry about anything I did,” she said.

“I did it my way, as Frank Sinatra would say. I’ve written five books since the diagnosis. I’ve lived my life, I’ve travelled all over the world. I have not turned down book tours and no-one has even known until now when I feel as though I should come out with it,” she said. “Now I want to save other people’s lives.”

Recently in London promoting her latest book, The Santangelos, she appeared on the ITV programme Loose Women, nine days before her death.

Jackie Collins (@jackiejcollins) I had a wonderful time with the ladies of @loosewomen today. Thank you! #TheSantangelos pic.twitter.com/NxWcZ31fqW

Collins, daughter of Joseph Collins, a showbusiness manager, and his wife Elsa, and raised in a basement flat on London’s Marylebone Road, followed her older sister in acting as a teenager, winning small parts in British B movies.

Although she always wanted to write, she said she she received no encouragement until her second husband, Oscar Lerman, to whom she was married for 26 years until his death, on reading the opening pages of The World Is Full Of Married Men, insisted she finish it.



“I got no encouragement. They just sent you to school – nobody would say, ‘How did you do? I was top in English composition. Everything else I was two out of 100”, she told the Guardian in 2011.



When The World Is Full of Married Men was published in 1968, it was promptly banned in Australia and South Africa, with the doyenne of romantic fiction Barbara Cartland denouncing it as “nasty, filthy and disgusting”. It was “way before its time” Collins later said. She went on to co-write the screenplay for a film adaptation in 1979.



Eight of her novels have been adapted for screen, either as films or television mini-series, including Hollywood Wives, starring Farrah Fawcett and Anthony Hopkins.



Throughout her career, Collins rose at dawn each day and wrote in long hand. Once she moved to America she kept fans enthralled with unrivalled insider knowledge of Hollywood. She wrote about “real people in disguise”, as she described them. “If anything, my characters are toned down – the truth is much more bizarre”.

She said she “never felt bashful writing about sex”. “Sex is a driving force in the world so I don’t think it’s unusual that I write about sex. I try to make it erotic, too,” she told the Associated Press in a 2011 interview.

Tributes poured in, such as from veteran US talk show host Larry King.

Larry King (@kingsthings) I'm shocked & saddened by Jackie Collins' passing. She was a true talent, a beautiful being & a dear friend.

Jilly Cooper, the UK novelist also famed for her saucy fiction, said news of her death was a “terrible shock”, and said her decision not to tell people “was a mark of her splendour, really”.



“Everybody is so dingy and politically correct now, and she didn’t care, she just wrote what she liked about,” she told LBC radio. “I think she had more fun than that girl who got beaten to bits in Shades of Grey, don’t you?”

Melissa Gilbert, former Little House on the Prairie actor who starred alongside Fawcett in Hollywood Wives, tweeted “An amazing woman. Talented. Funny, Kind. One of my very favourite producers ever. She will be deeply missed”.



Presenter Graham Norton described her as “the definition of a class act”. While Oprah Winfrey said” “RIP Jackie Collins. I always loved our interviews”.

Comedian Sandra Bernhard wrote: “I am devastated at the news about Jackie Collins. I knew her, she was a class act and a lady. The diarist of Hollywood at it’s best and worse. German vogue did a story on me and Jackie Collins. It was a lunch and girl talk. We both wore leopard and laughed our asses off”.

In an interview with the Press Association earlier this month, Collins said she chose to celebrate life rather than mourn those close to her who had died. “I refuse to mourn people, because everybody dies. Death and taxes, you can’t avoid either,” she said.