杰姬·科林斯

杰姬·科林斯 OBE（英语：Jackie Collins，1937年10月4日—2015年9月19日）是一位英国爱情小说作家和演员，也是琼·考琳丝的妹妹。1985年，她搬到洛杉矶定居。 她一生一共创作了32部小说，这些小说全部登上纽约时报畅销书榜。她的书销量超过 5 亿册，而且被翻译成40种语言。不过她的一些作品一度因为色情内容过多而在部分国家被封禁。她的8部小说已被改编成电影或电视连续剧。最终杰姬·科林斯因乳腺癌去世。

Jacqueline Jill Collins (4 October 1937 – 19 September 2015) was an English romance novelist and actress. She moved to Los Angeles in 1985 and spent most of her career there. She wrote 32 novels, all of which appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list. Her books have sold more than 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. She was the younger sister of Joan Collins.

Early life

Collins was born on 4 October 1937, in Hampstead, London, the younger daughter of Elsa (née Bessant) Collins (died 1962) and Joseph William Collins (died 1988), a theatrical agent whose clients later included Shirley Bassey, the Beatles, and Tom Jones.

Collins's South African-born father was Jewish, and her British mother was Anglican. A middle child, Collins had an elder sister, Joan Collins (actress and author), and a younger brother, Bill (who became a property agent).

Collins attended Francis Holland School, an independent day school for girls in London and was expelled at age 15. During this period, she reportedly had a brief affair with 29-year-old Marlon Brando.

Early career

In 1956, Collins visited her older sister, Joan, who was then based in Los Angeles. She returned to London after failing to gain a U.S. work permit to enable her to be groomed for stardom at 20th Century Fox. Collins began appearing in acting roles in a series of British B movies. These included They Never Learn (1956), Barnacle Bill (1957), Rock You Sinners (1957), The Safecracker (1958), Intent to Kill (1958), Passport to Shame (1958), and The Shakedown (1960), in which she was credited as Lynn Curtis. After minor appearances in such television series as Danger Man and The Saint, Collins gave up on pursuing an acting career, although she did play briefly on the television series Minder in 1980.

Her first book, The World Is Full of Married Men (1968), became a best-seller. Four decades later, she admitted she was a "school dropout" and "juvenile delinquent" when she was 15: "I'm glad I got all of that out of my system at an early age," she said, adding that she "never pretended to be a literary writer."

Writing career

1960s

Collins later said that she always wanted to write, not act. By the age of 13 classmates paid to listen to sex scenes she wrote. Collins began many works of fiction but abandoned them, and only completed her first novel after being persuaded to do so by her second husband Oscar Lerman. "You're a storyteller", he told her. After the publication of her first novel The World Is Full of Married Men, romantic novelist Barbara Cartland called the book "nasty, filthy and disgusting", and charged Collins with "creating every pervert in Britain". The book was banned in Australia and South Africa, but the scandal bolstered sales in the United States and the UK.

Her second novel, The Stud, was published in 1969. It also made the best-seller lists.

1970s

By the 1970s Collins was a peer of successful male airport novel authors like Sidney Sheldon and Harold Robbins.. Her third novel, Sunday Simmons & Charlie Brick (first published under the title The Hollywood Zoo in the UK and then retitled Sinners worldwide in 1984) was published in 1971 and again made the best-seller lists. This was Collins's first novel to be set in the United States.

Lovehead followed in 1974 (retitled as The Love Killers in 1989). This novel was Collins's first foray into the world of organized crime, a genre that would later prove to be extremely successful for her.

Following this, Collins published The World Is Full of Divorced Women (unrelated to her first novel) in 1975, and then Lovers & Gamblers in 1977, which told the story of rock/soul superstar Al King.