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During the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a well-known star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, sunshine-y film with a excellent part for a older actress, addressing the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity place with boring, predictable individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to live the real thing away from the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the roguish native, the character Costas, acted with an striking moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

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

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and cloying older-age films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Director Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

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