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During the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a familiar star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, sunshine-y film with a superb character for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity place with boring, dull folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to encounter the genuine culture away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous native, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age entertainments about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller referenced by the film's name.

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