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In the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a familiar figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, bright film with a excellent character for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She turned into the toast of London theater and Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with life in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative country with monotonous, predictable people. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to live the real thing outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the charming native, Costas, played with an striking mustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and cloying silver-years films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role 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 dodgy psychic alluded to by the title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable period of glory.