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In the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a recognisable star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that audiences adored, extending into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic story with a superb role for a older actress, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Film

The story began from Collins performing the main character of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely followed the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her 40s in a dull, uninspired country with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to experience the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming local, the character Costas, played with an bold mustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively career on the stage and on TV, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying older-age entertainments about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller alluded to by the title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary time to shine.