Jackie Collins, famed for her racy novels such as Hollywood Wives and The Stud, has died of breast cancer aged 77. The British-born bestselling writer, who wrote 32 novels of glamour, sex and affairs in Hollywood, had kept her cancer secret from all but her closest family for more than six years and died in Los Angeles.

Her older sister, actor Dame Joan Collins, 82, who had only recently been informed of the diagnosis, according to People magazine, was “completely devastated”.

“She was my best friend. I admire how she handled this. She was a wonderful, brave and a beautiful person and I love her,” she said.

Collins was married twice and is survived by her three daughters.

In a statement the family said she had broken new ground for female writers in fiction. “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.

“She lived a wonderfully full life and was adored by her family, friends and the millions of readers who she has been entertaining over four decades.

“She was a true inspiration, a trail blazer for women in fiction and a creative force. She will live on through her characters but we already miss her beyond words.”

Born in London, Collins began an acting career as a teenager, winning small parts in British B movies. Although she wanted to give up acting and become a writer, she said she received no encouragement until her second husband, Oscar Lerman, told her she could write.

“I got no encouragement. They just sent you to school – nobody would say: ‘How did you do?’ I was top in English composition. Everything else I was two out of 100,” she told the Guardian in 2011.

Her debut novel, The World is Full of Married Men, was reportedly deemed “filthy and disgusting” by the romantic writer Barbara Cartland, and was banned in Australia and several other countries.

The book, which is a tale of a woman who cheats on her husband and who likes sex with married men was “way before its time”, Collins later said.

Once she moved to America, Collins, who was awarded an OBE in 2013, promised readers unrivalled 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. People in Hollywood trusted her with their stories because she knew the rules the town lived by, she said.

Her novels include The Love Killers, and The World is Full of Divorced Women. Hollywood Wives was made into a television series starring Farrah Fawcett and Anthony Hopkins

Describing writing as her lifelong obsession, she said she rose at dawn to write out pages in long hand.

She “never felt bashful writing about sex”, she told Associated Press in a 2011 interview. “I think I’ve helped people’s sex lives,” she said. “Sex is a driving force in the world so I don’t think it’s unusual that I write about sex. I try to make it erotic, too.”

In her last, still to be published interview with US People magazine on 14 September at her Beverly Hills home, she said she had no regrets about the decision to keep her cancer private. “Looking back, I’m not sorry about anything I did,” she said.

“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 travelled 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,” she said. “Now I want to save other people’s lives.”

Recently in London, promoting her latest book The Santangelos, she appeared on the ITV programme Loose Women nine days before her death.

In a career spanning four decades, she sold more than 500m novels in more than 40 countries.

In an interview with the Press Association earlier this month, she said she chose to celebrate life rather than mourn those close to her who had died. “I refuse to mourn people,” she said, “because everybody dies. Death and taxes, you can’t avoid either.” Her mother, Elsa Collins, second husband Lerman and fiance Frank Calcagnini all died from cancer.

(The Guardian)