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During the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a familiar celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic film with a superb character for a older actress, broaching the theme of women's desires that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely followed the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, uninspired nation with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to experience the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the roguish native, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on TV, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying older-age stories about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous period of glory.