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In the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a well-known celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic film with a superb character for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Film

The story began from Collins playing the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit film version. This closely mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, uninspired country with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to encounter the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish local, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying elderly entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.