NEW YORK — Barbara Taylor Bradford, a British journalist who turned a publishing sensation in her 40s with the saga “A Woman of Substance” and wrote greater than a dozen different novels that bought tens of hundreds of thousands of copies, has died. She was 91.
Bradford died Sunday at her dwelling in New York Metropolis, a spokesperson stated Monday.
Beginning with “A Woman of Substance,” revealed in 1979, Bradford averaged almost a e-book a 12 months as one of many world’s hottest and wealthiest writers, her internet price estimated at greater than $200 million and her fame so excessive that her picture appeared on a postage stamp in 1999. In 2007, Queen Elizabeth II awarded her an OBE (The Most Wonderful Order of the British Empire).
Her books had been revealed in 40 languages and bought greater than 90 million copies world wide.
With titles like “Breaking the Rules” and ”Act of Will,” she specialised in tales of girls combating for love and energy in a person’s world. Her favourite amongst her books was “The Women In His Life,” impressed by her husband’s escape from the Nazis.
Bradford was married for 56 years to German-born movie producer Robert Bradford, who died in 2019.
Though she wrote kids’s tales and recommendation books, novels had been her dream. “A Woman of Substance” was a multi-generational chronicle of the travails and triumphs of retail baron Emma Harte, who can be featured in a number of different Bradford novels. The e-book has bought greater than 30 million copies and was the premise of a 1984 tv miniseries starring Jenny Seagrove as a younger Emma and Deborah Kerr as Emma late in life.
“And if you want to meet the real Emma, meet me,” Bradford advised the Telegraph of London in 2009. “Emma had to be tough and ruthless at times: but then so am I. I have to be, as a businesswoman. And I’m a bloody good businesswoman.”
Bradford and Emma Harte had been linked by greater than cash: each had household secrets and techniques. As a younger lady, Emma turned pregnant by a person who refused to marry her and gave start to a daughter. Years later, Bradford realized by way of her biographer that her personal mom had been born out of wedlock. It’s now believed that Bradford’s maternal grandfather was Frederick Oliver Robinson, the second Marquess of Ripon and proprietor of the Studley Royal property in Yorkshire, which is now a World Heritage Website.
Seagrove, who turned mates with Bradford after starring within the miniseries, described her as a “powerhouse of glamour and warmth” and a “force of nature” who stayed true to her roots.
“Success never diluted her warmth and humor or her ability to relate to everyone she met, whether a cleaner or a princess,” Seagrove stated. “She never, ever forgot that she was just a girl from Yorkshire that worked hard and made good. RIP dear friend.”
Bradford had a strict writing routine: at work behind her IBM Lexmark typewriter by 6 a.m., break round 1 p.m., then again to writing till 6 p.m., on the newest. In line with a certified 2006 biography, Piers Dudgeon’s “The Woman of Substance,” Bradford greater than tailored to her midlife fortune, residing in a 5,300 sq. foot house overlooking Manhattan’s East River, accumulating Impressionist artwork and having fun with refills of pink champagne poured by her Moroccan butler. When the Bradfords put their house up on the market in 2010, the asking worth was just below $19 million. (They bought it to Uma Thurman in 2013 for $10 million).
Through the years, she met many different celebrities. Bradford befriended Sean Connery earlier than he appeared in his first James Bond film and remembered advising him, fortunately in useless, that he ought to lose his Scottish accent if he needed to succeed.
Across the identical time, she met a fellow journalist on the Yorkshire Night Put up. He was “lanky and disheveled with acne,” and stored attempting to speak to her even after she turned him down for a date on the films.
He was Peter O’Toole.
“Years later, (Evening Post editor) Keith Waterhouse and I were at an event where the producer Sam Spiegel introduced the star of his new movie,” she advised The Guardian in 2021. “Out walked the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, dressed as Lawrence of Arabia. Keith said: ‘Don’t you wish you’d gone to the pictures with him now?’ I never got over Peter’s transformation.”