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In the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a well-known celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, comical, bright comedy with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, broaching the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative place with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to live the genuine culture away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish resident, the character Costas, played with an outrageous mustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active career on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the film's name.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.