Jackie Collins, the best-selling British-born author known for her vibrant novels about the extravagance and glamour of life in Hollywood, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. She was 77.
The cause was breast cancer, her family said in a statement.
Long before the emergence of the “Fifty Shades of Grey” franchise, Ms. Collins dominated the publishing industry’s more lascivious corners.
She wrote more than 30 books, many of them filled with explicit, unrestrained sexuality, and sold more than 500 million copies worldwide. Her first novel, “The World Is Full of Married Men,” was published in 1968. Australia and South Africa banned it because of its frank depiction of extramarital sex. Other earlier works included “The Stud,” in 1969, and “Rock Star,” in 1988.
Ms. Collins, the younger sister of the actress Joan Collins, wrote her books in longhand on either white printer paper or yellow legal pads, regularly churning out prodigious numbers of pages.
Writing in The New York Times in 1993, Barry Gewen said of Ms. Collins’s “American Star: A Love Story” that it might more appropriately be titled “Coming Up for Air.”
In 2006, reviewing her “Lovers & Players” in The Times, the critic Janet Maslin described Ms. Collins’s writing as “crypto-celebrity gamesmanship” in which the author “maneuvers her characters through a story as if she were playing by a strict set of rules.”
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