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In the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a familiar star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, bright story with a excellent part for a older actress, addressing the theme of women's desires that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the smash-hit film version. This very much paralleled the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired country with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to experience the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous resident, Costas, played with an bold moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively work on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental older-age entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Director Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller alluded to by the film's name.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous period of glory.