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In the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, optimistic film with a wonderful part for a older actress, addressing the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Film

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She turned into the toast of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity country with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to experience the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous resident, Costas, played with an striking mustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

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

However, she discovered herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying silver-years entertainments about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, 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 Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable time to shine.