Hugely successful author Jackie Collins may have been branded the “Queen of Sleaze” by some literary critics due to her explicit novels, but a new documentary is exploring her career in a new light – as a feminist icon.
Collins, considered a feminist icon, the sister of actress Dame Joan, sold about half a billion books and published 32 novels during her lifetime, but they were banned in some countries due to their content.
Lady Boss: The Jackie Collins Story, by filmmaker Laura Fairrie, looks back at the life of the London-born writer, whose works include bestsellers such as 1983’s Hollywood Wives.
Collins died of cancer in 2015, but Fairrie had access to Jackie’s diaries and was able to interview the author’s three daughters as well as Dame Joan.
“I was looking for another film to do, and I wanted to make it about a fabulous woman,” Fairrie explains.
When she heard talk of a project about Jackie Collins, she simply said: “She was my sex education.”
Fairrie recalled Collins’ books being passed around at school.
“We read them in maths lessons hidden under the desks, so I just had this connection to her from my teenage years, that immediately just gave me a really good insight into who she was.”
She added: “I was interested in turning the tables and looking at the other side of the public story. The persona that she created.”
Collins was born in 1937, and her father was a showbusiness agent. She started writing diaries at a young age, but her first novel, The World is Full of Married Men, was published in 1968, after the author had left an unhappy first marriage.
The book, about extramarital affairs, was banned in Australia and South Africa.
Collins later moved to Los Angeles and published a series of books about her favourite heroine, Lucky Santangelo, including 1981’s Chances and 1990’s Lady Boss.
Her novel Hollywood Wives, which has sold 15 million copies, was an explicit look at Tinseltown and represented the height of her career in the 1980s.
“When I spoke to Jackie’s friends in Hollywood, they said that when the book was published, that there was a queue around the block of all the maids in uniforms outside the bookstores,” Fairrie recalls.
“They’d been sent to get the books by the real ‘Hollywood wives’ who were going to go through it and see if they were in it. Partly they wanted to be in it, but they were afraid of it too.”
