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In the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a recognisable star on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, sunshine-y film with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the alike path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative place with boring, unimaginative people. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to live the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish native, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active career on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a servant-level maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy silver-years films about seniors, 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 movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller referenced by the movie's title.

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