Jackie Collins

English romance novelist who moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s to join her older sister, Hollywood actress Joan Collins, and spent most of her career there. She wrote 32 novels, mostly torrid paperback romances, all of which appeared on The New York Times bestsellers list. Her books have sold over 500 million copies and have been translated into 40 languages. Eight of her novels have been adapted for the screen, either as films or television miniseries. Jackie Collins was married to the manic depressive and drug-addicted fashion exec Wallace Austin from 1960 to 1965. She was married from 1969 to much older club owner Oscar Lerman until his death on 2 March 1992 of prostate cancer. They had two daughters together, Tiffany Jane (born 1967 in London) and Rory Samantha (born 1969 in London). Lerman formally adopted Collins' daughter, Tracy (born 1961 in London), from her marriage to Austin. On 20 September 1995, Collins became engaged to a friend of the past 20 years, real estate developer Frank Calcagnini, fifty-something. They remained engaged until his death in 1998. In 2001, after 18 years of turning out sizzling sex-and-glamour books, Collins published Hollywood Wives; her previous titles including The World Is Full of Married Men (1968), The Stud (1969), The Bitch (1979) and Chances (1981). Collins died at her home in Beverly Hills on 19 September 2015 from breast cancer, two weeks before her 78th birthday. She had been diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer more than six years before her death but kept her illness almost entirely to herself. She reportedly only informed her sister Joan Collins two weeks before she died and flew from Los Angeles to London to appear on the ITV chat show Loose Women only nine days before her death. Link to Wikipedia biography