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In the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, funny, and appealingly charming female actor. She grew into a well-known star on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, comical, bright story with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of women's desires that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully cast in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative nation with boring, predictable people. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s gone with – continues once it’s finished to live the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish resident, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and syrupy older-age stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.