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In the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a well-known star on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic film with a wonderful role for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster film version. This very much paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired nation with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to experience the genuine culture outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish native, Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the movies where there seemed not to be a author in the caliber of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy older-age stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary period of glory.