| Category | Details |
| Full Name | Jacqueline Jill Collins |
| Born | October 4, 1937, Hampstead, London |
| Died | September 19, 2015, Beverly Hills, California |
| Profession | Novelist, former actress, screenwriter |
| Nationality | British-American |
| Net Worth | $180 million (at time of death) |
| Spouse(s) | Wallace Austin (m. 1960, div. 1963), Oscar Lerman (m. 1965, d. 1992) |
| Children | Tracy, Tiffany, Rory |
| Known For | Hollywood Wives, the Lucky Santangelo novels |
| Sister | Joan Collins, actress |
Jackie Collins Wrote Hollywood From Experience
Jackie Collins spent decades inside the rooms other novelists could only guess at. She watched studio executives make deals over lunch, watched marriages fall apart at parties she was invited to, and turned what she saw into 32 novels that sold more than 500 million copies worldwide. By the time she died in 2015, her estate was valued at around $180 million, built almost entirely on book sales, film rights, and a writing career most of the industry had written off before it started.
Her books were often dismissed by critics as trashy or overheated. Readers disagreed, in huge numbers, for nearly fifty years.
From a Failed Acting Career to the Book That Started Everything
Collins was born in 1937 in Hampstead, London, the daughter of theatrical agent Joseph Collins and former dancer Elsa Collins. Her father’s clients included Shirley Bassey, and show business was simply the family trade. Her older sister, Joan Collins, went into acting early and found real success. Jackie tried the same path first.
She appeared in a handful of British films in the late 1950s and early 1960s, none of which led anywhere close to what Joan achieved. She was expelled from school as a teenager and later admitted she spent her adolescence reading her sister’s diary and sneaking into adult films rather than sitting through lessons. The acting career fizzled. What replaced it did not happen by accident.
Her second husband, nightclub owner Oscar Lerman, was the one who pushed her toward writing. In 1968 she published her first novel, The World Is Full of Married Men, a blunt look at infidelity that scandalized parts of the British press and sold well anyway. It was banned in Australia and South Africa. Collins later said the reaction told her she had found the right subject.
Building an Empire Around One Family: The Lucky Santangelo Novels
The book that turned Collins into a genuine publishing phenomenon was Hollywood Wives, released in 1983. It became a number one New York Times bestseller and was adapted into a television miniseries two years later. But her most lasting creation was Lucky Santangelo, the tough, self-made daughter of a mob boss who first appeared in Chances (1981) and returned across roughly a dozen more novels over the following three decades.
Lucky was not a passive romance heroine. She ran casinos, ran studios, and ran her own family, at a time when very few women in commercial fiction were written that way. Collins gave interviews saying Lucky was the woman she wished she had been, and readers responded to that honesty. The Santangelo series became the backbone of her career, translated into more than 40 languages and read across generations of the same families.
Eight of her novels reached film or television screens. She wrote or co-wrote several of the adaptations herself and produced others, which is part of why her income never depended on book royalties alone.
The Business Behind the Bestsellers
Collins built her fortune the way a producer would, not the way most novelists do. Book sales were the foundation, but television and film rights, backlist royalties, and property added real weight to the total. She and Lerman built a home in Beverly Hills that ran to roughly 25,000 square feet, completed the week before he died in 1992, and she credited its proximity to the kind of people she wrote about as part of why she never ran out of material.
In 2011, The Sunday Times named her the fifth richest author in the United Kingdom. Two years later, she was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to literature, a formal recognition of a career the literary establishment had spent decades sneering at in print while her books kept topping their own bestseller lists.
Her last completed novel, Goddess of Vengeance, arrived in 2011 as her 28th book by some counts and closer to her 32nd across her full bibliography, depending on how reissues and screenplay adaptations are counted. Sources differ slightly on the exact figure, but every count places her well past the point most novelists ever reach.
Two Marriages, Three Children, and a Home Base in Los Angeles
Collins married twice. Her first marriage, to Wallace Austin in 1960, ended in divorce in 1963 and produced her eldest daughter, Tracy. Her second marriage, to Oscar Lerman in 1965, lasted until his death from cancer in 1992 and produced two more daughters, Tiffany and Rory. Lerman also ran Tramps, a well-known London nightclub, before the couple moved their base to Los Angeles.
After Lerman’s death, Collins did not remarry, and she spoke often about raising her daughters largely on her own while maintaining a writing schedule that rarely slowed. She wrote most mornings before anyone else in the house was awake, a habit she kept for most of her adult life.
Jackie and Joan: Sisters Who Took Very Different Roads to the Same Kind of Fame
The comparison to her sister followed Collins for her entire career, and she rarely avoided the subject. Joan Collins became one of the most recognizable actresses of the 1980s through her role as Alexis Carrington on Dynasty, a part that made her a household name at almost the same time Jackie’s novels were topping bestseller lists.
The two were close for most of their lives despite the obvious rivalry a stranger might assume existed. Jackie once said she wrote the kind of women Joan got to play on screen, and Joan has said publicly that she saw her sister’s books as a version of the industry told from the other side of the camera. Their brother, Bill Collins, chose a much quieter path and became a real estate agent.
A Six-Year Battle With Cancer That Almost No One Knew About
Collins was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009 and kept the diagnosis private for six years, continuing to write, tour, and give interviews without disclosing it. She died on September 19, 2015, in Beverly Hills, at age 77.
The scale of the secrecy surprised even people close to the publishing industry, since Collins had spent her public life being anything but private about most other subjects. She reportedly told her family she did not want the diagnosis to define how people saw her work or her final years. Her last novel written before her death, The Santangelos, was published in 2015, months before she died, closing out the family saga she had spent more than thirty years building.
What Jackie Collins Left Behind
What she did instead was build a readership that stayed loyal across five decades and helped open commercial space for women writers whose books openly discussed ambition, sex, and power without apologizing for any of it. Writers like Danielle Steel and later Jackie Collins-influenced authors in the erotic fiction boom of the 2010s owe a real debt to the ground she covered first, often against the disapproval of publishers who thought her material was too much.
The 2021 documentary Lady Boss: The Jackie Collins Story revisited her career for an audience that had mostly known her as a name on airport paperback racks rather than as the person behind the Lucky Santangelo novels. It reframed her as a working writer with a strict daily routine and a real understanding of the industry she wrote about, rather than the tabloid caricature that sometimes overshadowed the books themselves.
Her novels remain in print. Her estate continues to license television and film rights to the Santangelo universe, and new editions of her backlist still find readers who were born after some of the books were originally published.
