Jackie Collins, who wrote the kind of novels that tweedy English professors typically ignore or sniff at — sex-filled, escapist, utterly unpretentious — but that millions of readers devour and teenagers used to read by flashlight under the covers at night, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. She was 77.
The cause was breast cancer, her family said in a statement on the author’s website.
“Jackie Collins is one of the world’s top-selling novelists,” the website says, boasting that her 30 or so books have sold more than 500 million copies in 40 countries while giving readers “an unrivaled insider’s knowledge of Hollywood and the glamorous lives (and loves) of the rich, famous, and infamous!”
Interviewed by The Associated Press in 2011, Ms. Collins herself said: “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.”
Indeed, her first novel, “The World Is Full of Married Men,” was so steamy that for a time it was banned in Australia and South Africa after its publication in 1968. Ms. Collins gleefully recounted in a magazine interview a confrontation with the romance writer Barbara Cartland, who called the book “filthy and disgusting” and blamed her “for all the perverts in England.”
“Thank you,” Ms. Collins said.
Ms. Collins wrote in longhand on white printer paper or yellow legal pads, her output suggesting that she did not agonize over each noun and verb. Some of Ms. Collins’s other books, whose titles were more or less self-explanatory, were “Hollywood Wives,” “Lovers and Players,” “Hollywood Wives: The New Generation,” “Hollywood Husbands,” “Hollywood Kids” and “Hollywood Divorces.” Many of her novels were adapted for movies and television series.
“On the beach and in the bedroom, perhaps no one plays with the heart — and other body parts — as successfully as scandal queen Jackie Collins,” a reviewer for The Philadelphia Daily News wrote of her second novel, “The Stud,” published in 1969.
In a 2007 interview with The New York Times, Ms. Collins was asked which authors influenced her work. She mentioned two writers seldom, if ever, mentioned in the same sentence: Charles Dickens and Mickey Spillane.
If some serious critics were tempted to laugh at her (as they did at Mr. Spillane, the lowbrow but hugely successful crime novelist), Ms. Collins could laugh back — all the way to the bank, to use a cliché that surely would not have bothered her.
Several years ago, the London press estimated her fortune at $150 million. While she dismissed that figure as “absolutely ridiculous,” she lived in a Beverly Hills mansion built around a swimming pool. She dressed in high style and traveled around the world.
Her most recent book, “The Santangelos,” came out in June. A synopsis on the author’s website suggests that it is heavier on plot than on introspection: “A vicious hit. A vengeful enemy. A drug addled Colombian club owner. A sex crazed Italian family. And the ever powerful Lucky Santangelo has to deal with them all.”
What’s more, the heroine’s teenage daughter is becoming famous in Europe’s modeling world, “and her Kennedyesque son, Bobby, is being set up for a murder he didn’t commit.”
“I never pretended to be a literary writer,” Ms. Collins said in the 2007 interview with The Times. “I’m a school dropout.”
And a bit of a hellion, she might have added.
Jacqueline Jill Collins was born in London on Oct. 4, 1937. Her father, Joseph, was a theatrical agent. Apparently, neither her father nor her mother, Elsa, was overly affectionate.
“I raised myself,” she told The Huffington Post in July. “I was a middle child who nobody paid any attention to.” (An aunt called her “Scruffy.”)
When she was a teenager, she was expelled from a school for girls, prompting her to throw her uniform into the Thames.
“Then it was like, Hollywood or reform school,” she told The Telegraph in 2012. “So I went to join my sister who was living in Hollywood.”
Joan, who was four years older, was the less rebellious sister, and was establishing herself as a serious actress. (Jackie was also an actress, briefly.)
Jackie was 15 when she met Marlon Brando at a Hollywood party, she told The Daily Mail in 2010. He was 29 at the time.
“We had a very brief but fabulous affair,” she said. “It was such a thrill for me because it was the most amazing introduction to Hollywood. I had only been there a week and there was my favorite movie star, coming on to me.”
Ms. Collins’s first marriage, to Wallace Austin, ended in divorce. Her second husband, Oscar Lerman, died of prostate cancer in 1992 after the couple had been married for 27 years. Four years later, her fiancé, Frank Calcagnini, died of cancer.
In addition to her sister, Ms. Collins is survived by three daughters, Tracy, Tiffany, and Rory; a brother, Bill; and six grandchildren.
With her fame and outgoing personality, Ms. Collins socialized with people as diverse as Oprah Winfrey, Sandra Bullock, Sidney Poitier, Larry King and Don Rickles. She was also close to her sister, who became famous onstage and screen, notably in the “Dynasty” television series of the 1980s. Joan Collins said in a statement that she was “devastated” by her sister’s death.
Jackie Collins, who had kept her illness secret, said recently that she believed in an afterlife, that she had no regrets and that she had emulated Frank Sinatra in that “I did it my way.”