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During the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She became a well-known celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y film with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely followed the comparable transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative nation with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to live the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming resident, the character Costas, acted with an striking mustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental elderly films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the film's name.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.