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During the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a recognisable star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y film with a wonderful role for a older actress, broaching the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative place with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to encounter the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish local, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the class of 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 the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age entertainments about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic referenced by the title.

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