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In the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a familiar celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright film with a superb character for a older actress, broaching the theme of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role prefigured the emerging discussion about perimenopause and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully cast in the blockbuster film version. This largely followed the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her middle age in a boring, unimaginative place with monotonous, dull people. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to encounter the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous local, the character Costas, acted with an bold facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in 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 director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying elderly films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary period of glory.