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During the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a familiar star on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic film with a excellent role for a older actress, broaching the subject of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the star of the West End and Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity place with boring, dull individuals. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s over to experience the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming local, Costas, acted with an striking mustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying elderly entertainments about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like 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 Brief Return in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller referenced by the title.

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