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In the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a recognisable star on each side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y story with a superb role for a older actress, addressing the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful cinematic rendition. 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 Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, uninspired country with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to experience the real thing away from the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish native, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively career on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs maid.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying silver-years stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller hinted at by the movie's title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous time to shine.