Jackie Collins Biography Quotes 31 Report mistakes

Early Life
Jacqueline Jill Collins was born on 4 October 1937 in London, England, into a family closely connected to show business. Her father, Joseph (Joe) Collins, worked as a theatrical agent, and her mother, Elsa Bessant Collins, maintained the household that also included daughter Joan, who would become a celebrated actress, and son Bill. Growing up with a father who represented actors and entertainers gave her an insider's view of performance, publicity, and the machinery behind fame. As a teenager she was spirited and independent; she left formal schooling early and began observing adult worlds of ambition, glamour, and power that would later fuel her fiction. For a time she spent stretches in Hollywood with her sister Joan, absorbing the rhythms of the studio system and the social scene surrounding it.

Beginnings in Entertainment
In the 1950s Jackie Collins tried her hand at acting, taking small roles and testing whether life in front of the camera suited her. The work acquainted her with scripts, sets, and the practical realities of film and television production, but it also crystallized a different ambition. Rather than pursue performance, she began writing: sketching characters, scenes, and stories drawn from the people and places she had encountered. She saw the entertainment world not only as spectacle but as raw material, a setting where love, money, betrayal, and reinvention collided. Those notes matured into a first novel that would announce her voice, bold, unblushing, and commercial.

Breakthrough as a Novelist
Her debut, The World Is Full of Married Men (1968), arrived with a scandal that amplified its success. The book's frank treatment of sex and infidelity triggered bans in some countries and public denunciations from conservative quarters, but readers embraced its brisk pace and recognizable archetypes. Collins followed with The Stud (1969) and other early titles that helped solidify a brand: fast, glamorous, and unafraid to depict the transactional nature of desire and fame. She wrote with an ear for dialogue and an instinct for the deal-making and image-crafting that animate nightlife, fashion, and film. The publicity around her books, some of it hostile, only strengthened her profile and made her a fixture on bestseller lists in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Hollywood Wives and the Lucky Santangelo Saga
In the 1980s Collins reached a new level of fame. Chances (1981) introduced Lucky Santangelo, the fiercely ambitious heroine who became her signature character and returned in sequels including Lucky (1985), Lady Boss (1990), Vendetta: Lucky's Revenge (1996), Dangerous Kiss (1999), Drop Dead Beautiful (2007), Goddess of Vengeance (2011), and The Santangelos (2015). Parallel to that series, Hollywood Wives (1983) became one of the decade's defining beach reads, a sprawling, multi-character portrait of Tinseltown's alliances and betrayals. Its success cemented Collins as a chronicler of modern celebrity culture and the shifting power dynamics between men and women. She continued to broaden her canvas with titles such as Hollywood Husbands and American Star, returning again and again to themes of ambition, loyalty, and survival.

Adaptations and Media Presence
Collins's work translated readily to screens large and small. The Stud (1978) and The Bitch (1979) were adapted into films starring her sister Joan Collins, with Jackie closely involved in bringing her stories to the screen. Hollywood Wives was adapted as a television miniseries, drawing massive audiences and further embedding her characters in popular culture. She became a lively guest on talk shows and a familiar figure in newspapers and magazines, where her unapologetically glamorous persona echoed the worlds she depicted. Translated into numerous languages and sold in vast quantities, her novels found readers on multiple continents. Over the course of more than 30 books, she built a readership that trusted her to deliver pace, intrigue, and formidable female leads.

Personal Life
Jackie Collins's personal life intertwined with her professional one in ways that shaped her career. She married Wallace Austin in the early 1960s, and they had a daughter, Tracy. After that marriage ended, she wed Oscar Lerman, an art dealer and nightlife impresario associated with London's exclusive club scene; together they had two daughters, Tiffany and Rory. Lerman's encouragement helped her navigate the mechanics of publishing and promotion at a time when female writers of commercial fiction were often patronized. After Lerman's death in 1992, Collins later shared her life with businessman Frank Calcagnini until his passing in 1998. Family remained central: she was close to Joan Collins, and the sisters' professional collaborations reinforced a bond first forged in their parents' London home. Her children were present at book launches and during tours, and she often referred to them as the anchor that steadied a hectic public life.

Working Methods and Themes
Collins wrote with discipline and a showrunner's sense of pacing, building interlocking casts that moved through nightclubs, studios, hotel suites, and executive offices. She favored strong women who seized control of their destinies and men whose charm concealed vulnerabilities or appetites. Power, money, and sex were not just provocations in her books; they were currencies in systems that rewarded audacity and punished hesitation. Her insider's knowledge, gleaned from decades orbiting the entertainment business through family, friends, and her own work, allowed her to seed plots with convincing detail. Critics often debated her literary merits, but even detractors acknowledged her command of narrative momentum and her uncanny timing with cultural shifts.

Recognition and Later Years
By the 2000s, Collins was a transatlantic fixture, maintaining homes in Los Angeles and London, touring regularly, and meeting a multigenerational audience that had grown up with Lucky Santangelo and the Hollywood novels. She remained prolific and media-savvy, engaging with readers while guarding her private life. In 2013 she was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to fiction and charity, a recognition that formalized what her sales and longevity had already demonstrated: she had become one of Britain's most successful popular novelists. Even as tastes and trends shifted, she adapted, updating settings and technology while preserving the propulsive energy that defined her earlier work.

Illness and Death
Jackie Collins died on 19 September 2015 in Los Angeles at the age of 77, following a private battle with breast cancer. She had kept her diagnosis largely within the family, determined to keep writing and to maintain a direct connection with readers through tours and appearances until very near the end of her life. Tributes poured in from the publishing world, from fans who had devoured her books on holidays and commutes, and from those who knew her personally, including her sister Joan Collins and her daughters Tracy, Tiffany, and Rory. The response reflected both the affection readers felt for her characters and respect for the industrious, often understated professionalism with which she sustained a decades-long career.

Legacy
Jackie Collins reshaped the landscape of commercial fiction by placing powerful, complicated women at the center of blockbuster narratives and by treating the entertainment industry as a modern court where status is won and lost in public view. With roots in a London family attuned to performance and with lifelong ties to Hollywood, she wrote across that transatlantic axis, translating insider gossip and observation into popular art. Her books have remained in print, her characters continue to attract new readers, and the world she charted, glittering, treacherous, and strangely familiar, still resonates. For many, she stands alongside a handful of 20th-century storytellers whose names signal a genre unto themselves, and whose lives and work are inseparable from the culture they helped to define.

Our collection contains 31 quotes who is written by Jackie, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Motivational - Music - Writing - Parenting.