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In the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a recognisable figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, bright story with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Film

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity place with boring, unimaginative people. So when she receives the opportunity at a no-cost trip in Greece, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to experience the authentic life beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming resident, Costas, portrayed with an bold mustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying elderly films about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous time to shine.