Jackie Collins 1997 Interview: Why Women Should Take Revenge

In this 1997 broadcast of The Dini Petty Show, Jackie Collins, the bestselling author behind Lucky Santangelo and Hollywood Wives, sits down with Dini Petty and refuses to play nice. By then she had built a global bestselling empire out of the Hollywood players who live on the edge, and she arrives as the undisputed queen of the beach read.

The heart of the conversation is the line she is known for, and she says it out loud: women should take revenge, and she means it. She explains how that conviction became Lucky Santangelo, the character she describes as a James Bond for women. When Dini asks whether she has ever taken revenge herself, the answer is pure Jackie. She also argues that Hollywood is wilder than anything she could invent, pointing to the O.J. Simpson case, the Menendez brothers and Heidi Fleiss as proof.

The rest of the interview fills in how she got there. She was selling scandalous stories to her schoolmates at fifteen. Her first novel was branded the most shocking book an English politician had ever read. She talks about her sister, Joan Collins, about being blindfolded and taken to Paris, and, at the very end, about exactly what she wants written on her tombstone.

Jackie Collins died in 2015, which makes this one of the last great sit-downs with her on Canadian television. Unseen since its original 1997 CTV broadcast, this master tape has been meticulously optimized and preserved via the official archive of The Dini Petty Show.