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During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a familiar figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, bright comedy with a excellent character for a older actress, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit film version. This very much followed the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative place with boring, dull people. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to experience the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous local, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s thinking. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on television, including roles 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 league of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and syrupy elderly films about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (albeit a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous period of glory.