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In the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a well-known figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, optimistic comedy with a excellent character for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Film

It originated from Collins performing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of the West End and Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This largely followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative country with boring, dull folk. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to live the real thing away from the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish local, Costas, acted with an striking mustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying silver-years films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic referenced by the film's name.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous time to shine.