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In the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She became a familiar star on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, humorous, sunshine-y film with a superb character for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Film

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of the West End and Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative place with boring, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s finished to experience the authentic life away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish resident, the character Costas, acted with an bold facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry 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 director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a servant-level maid.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic hinted at by the movie's title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.