LOS ANGELESJackie Collins, the best-selling author of dozens of steamy novels who depicted the boardrooms and bedrooms of Hollywood's power crowd, died on Saturday of breast cancer at age 77, her family said. 
 
 The British-born Collins, younger sister of actress Joan Collins, died in Los Angeles, said her spokeswoman Melody Korenbrot. 
 
 "It is with tremendous sadness that we announce the death of our beautiful, dynamic and one of a kind mother, Jackie Collins, who died of breast cancer today," the family said in a statement. 
 
 Collins, who wrote about characters driven by lust, power and greed, sold more than 500 millions copies of her books in 40 countries and has some 30 New York Times bestsellers, according to her own website. 
 
 Collins followed her older sister to Los Angeles when she was just a teenager. She did not only write about Hollywood, she also enjoyed great success in the entertainment industry with several of her stories adapted for television. 
 
 "I'm a storyteller. I'm not a literary writer and I never pretended to be," Collins told Reuters in 2008. 
 
 Some of her most successful novels included the 1983 "Hollywood Wives," about women living glamorous lives behind the scenes of the industry, and the 1985 "Lucky" and 1990 "Lady Boss" from her series focused on the ravishing and ambitious character Lucky Santangelo, who was born into an organized crime family. 
 
 Collins faced controversy during her career, writing novels so steamy they outraged political figures from Britain to China. 
 
 Her debut novel, "The World is Full of Married Men," was reportedly deemed "filthy and disgusting" by author Barbara Cartland and banned in Australia. Collins told Reuters the book was "way before its time" with its tale of a woman who cheats on her husband and another who likes sex with married men. 
 
 Collins promised readers unrivaled insiders' knowledge of Hollywood and said she wrote about "real people in disguise." 
 
 "If anything, my characters are toned down - the truth is much more bizarre," she wrote on her website. 
 
 She said people in Hollywood trusted her with their stories because she knew the rules the town lived by, and because she was devoted to marriage. 
 
 But Collins said her life lacked the scandal of her novels. She described writing as her lifelong obsession, and confessed to rising at dawn to write out pages in long hand. She also received emails from teenagers who said reading her novels taught them about sex. 
 
 Collins was married to her second husband, Oscar Lerman, for more than 25 years until his death in 1992. 
 
 Joan Collins, reacting to her sister's death, told People magazine that Jackie was her best friend. Earlier this month, Jackie Collins told People she had only recently informed her older sister of her battle with breast cancer for over six years. 
 
 "I admire how she handled this. She was a wonderful, brave and a beautiful person and I love her," Joan Collins told the magazine. 
 
 Jackie Collins is survived by three daughters. 
 
 (Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Mary Milliken and Diane Craft) ||||| Jackie Collins, whose dishy novels about the private lives of the Hollywood glitterati catapulted her to best-seller lists for decades, died Saturday in Los Angeles after a battle with breast cancer that she kept largely secret, her publicist said. She was 77. 
 
 Collins revealed the illness only to her family and closest friends until she spoke about it in a recent interview with People, said Melody Korenbrot, her publicist for 32 years. In the People interview, Collins said she had undergone a lumpectomy and radiation treatment. 
 
 "I've written five books since the diagnosis, I've lived my life, I've traveled all over the world," she told People. 
 
 Born in London on Oct. 4, 1937, Collins, the child of a theatrical agent, began hand-copying Mickey Spillane novels in her teens. 
 
 She described herself as a "major juvenile delinquent" who was thrown out of a boarding school at 15 for smoking and, in the late 1950s, followed her movie star older sister, Joan, to Hollywood. 
 
 For 26 years, she was married to Oscar Lerman, her second husband, who died of prostate cancer in 1992. She was engaged to Frank Calcagnini, an Italian businessman, when he died of cancer a few years later. 
 
 Collins achieved notoriety in 1968 with the publication of her first novel, "The World Is Full of Married Men," which made London's best-seller lists and inspired a member of Parliament to describe it as the dirtiest book he'd ever read. 
 
 Collins' website boasted that she wrote more than 30 best-selling novels, including "Hollywood Wives," "Hollywood Husbands" and "Hollywood Kids," which together sold more than 500 million copies around the world. 
 
 Novelist Jackie Collins chronicled the steamy side of Hollywood in such books as "Hollywood Wives." Collins wrote 31 bestselling novels, which together sold more than 500 million copies around the world. 
 
 "Everyone read her books," Korenbrot said. "I've seen them on airplanes, hotels, beaches." 
 
 Collins was a fixture on the Hollywood scene, where she frequented celebrity hangouts in search of story material, a practice that gave her novels an insider's feel. Her novels frequently involved strong female protagonists, including Lucky Santangelo, a businesswoman who "could do anything she chose to do," as Collins put it. 
 
 Santangelo possessed "a magnetic charismatic quality," Collins wrote, adding, "She radiated a presence full of beauty, power, passion and strength. A lethal combination.... Nobody told Lucky Santangelo what to do." 
 
 The Santangelo family saga began in 1981 with "Chances" and stretched into "The Santangelos," the ninth book in the series, published this year. 
 
 Collins was in the United Kingdom promoting the book this month, despite her illness. She was also active on Twitter, posting tweets as late as Friday, including: "#Emmys this weekend. Who do you want to win?" 
 
 Melissa Gilbert, who starred in an adaptation of "Hollywood Wives: The New Generation," tweeted Saturday: "An amazing woman. Talented. Funny. Kind. One of my very favorite producers ever. She will be deeply missed." 
 
 While beloved by readers, Collins was not a favorite of critics. "The sexual candor of 'Ulysses' is nothing compared to the multiple orgasms of Jackie Collins," Anthony Burgess once commented wryly. 
 
 Collins was "the undisputed schlock jock of the sun-and-sex-on-Sunset genre," then-Los Angeles Times staff writer Nikki Finke wrote in 1990. 
 
 Collins' harshest critic may have been Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who in 1988, finding her books too sexy, threatened her publishers with execution. 
 
 In an interview with The Times in 1985, Collins described herself as "a street writer who doesn't pretend to be anything else," adding: "I'm not grammatical in the way I talk, or in the way I write, and I don't pretend to be. I'm a high school dropout who eavesdrops." 
 
 Collins was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer more than six years ago but only recently revealed her illness to her sister Joan, according to the People story. She had kept it from her to avoid burdening her, she said. 
 
 In a statement, Joan Collins said she was "completely devastated" by her sister's death. 
 
 "She was my best friend," Collins said. "I admire how she handled this. She was a wonderful, brave and a beautiful person and I love her." 
 
 Collins leaves behind three daughters: Tracy, 54, Tiffany, 48, and Rory, 46. 
 
 christopher.goffard@latimes.com 
 
 Times staff writer Carolyn Kellogg contributed to this report. ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites.
– The family of Jackie Collins announced last night that the author of steamy novels had died at 77 of breast cancer, reports People. Collins followed actor sister Joan to Hollywood from the UK and became a star in own right, selling more than 500 million copies of her books. Maybe the height of her fame came in the 1980s with Hollywood Wives, which sold 15 million copies—while her sister was starring on Dynasty, notes AP. Her book spawned a TV miniseries of the same name. Some quotes collected from the various obituaries, including Reuters and the Los Angeles Times: "A lot of people say to me, 'Oh, I read your books under a cover with a flashlight when I was really young and I learned everything I know about sex from you.'" After the release of her first book, The World is Full of Married Men, in 1968, romance novelist "Barbara Cartland said to me, 'Oh, Miss Collins, your books are filthy and disgusting and you are responsible for all the perverts in England.' I pause for a few moments and said, 'Thank you.'" "If anything, my characters are toned down—the truth is much more bizarre." "I'm not grammatical in the way I talk, or in the way I write, and I don't pretend to be. I'm a high school dropout who eavesdrops." "I did it my way, as Frank Sinatra would say. I've written five books since the diagnosis, I've lived my life, I've traveled all over the world, I have not turned down book tours and no one has ever known until now when I feel as though I should come out with it," Collins told People in 2014 of her cancer diagnosis about five years earlier. "Now I want to save other people's lives."