Jackie Collins was a best-selling author of scandalously sexy romance novels whose fame rivaled that of her older sister, Dynasty star Joan Collins. She is still one of the best-selling authors of all time.
In this dishy, intimate documentary, her friends and family recall the late author, who died of breast cancer in 2015. She was known as much for her signature style — big hair and leopard print galore — as her message of female empowerment. In novels from Lady Boss to Lucky, her heroines always, as she says at one point in the film, “came out on top.”
Even if you’ve never read one of Collins’s books, this is a fascinating look at a self-made woman who managed to live life on her own terms despite some very serious setbacks.
Her literary manager — whose other clients included Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II — says of her, “there is no one else who built an empire and a brand like her.”
She may have not gotten the respect of critics — one critic in a dated clip dismisses her books as “just something to decorate an airport bookstore” — but that kind of potshot didn’t dissuade her from writing. Or from appearing on talk shows to promote, and often defend, her books.
She grew up in the shadow of elder sister, Joan, who was already a Hollywood star by the mid ’50s. Jackie wrote in her diary about her “awful inferiority complex.” She wasn’t helped by her verbally abusive father, who was known to lob a plate at her mother. While Joan was winning awards for “most beautiful young actress,” Jackie was being told she needed to slim down and that girls should know their place.
After a disastrous first marriage to a rich but abusive playboy, she found a supportive second husband in a nightclub owner, who encouraged her to finish her first novel, “The World Is Full of Married Men,” in 1968. It was accepted by the first publisher she sent it to and quickly climbed the charts.
But a woman writing about women who enjoyed sex as much as men did was considered shocking at the time. In an eyebrow-raising TV clip, veteran romance novelist Barbara Cartland tells Jackie that her novels disgust her. An initially shocked Jackie laughs it off and responds that if everyone wrote like Cartland, it would be a very dull world.
By the late ‘70s, Jackie’s success had eclipsed Joan’s, leaving her in a position to help revive her older sister’s career. Joan starred in a raunchy movie version of her sister’s novel, The Stud, and playing the title character in the sequel The Bitch helped Joan land her definitive role of Alexis Carrington on Dynasty a few years later.
Jackie’s jet-setting life, which involved hobnobbing with celebrities such as Michael Caine and Marlon Brando, was every bit as glamorous as the characters she created. When we learn about a charming new man entering her life, all three of her daughters describe him as being just like a character she would have written.
Even to the end, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she kept on working, appearing on a talk show to promote her new book mere days before her death. “It was like she wrote her own ending,” says her daughter.
The film ends with a line from one of her Lucky Santangelo novels, a character in whom Jackie clearly saw herself. “Lucky knew it was time to leave… She had power, she had control, she had everything she had always wanted. Tonight she would be like a queen.”
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
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Executive Produced by Courtney Sexton, Amy Entelis, Mark Bell,
Stuart Ford, Bonnie Voland, Andrew Ruhemann
Produced by John Battsek, Lizzie Gillett
Directed by Laura Fairrie
Featuring Hazel Collins, Joan Collins, Jennifer Daugherty,
Barbara Davis, Gina Fueth, Jan Gold, Johnny Gold, Rory Green
