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In the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a familiar star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, bright story with a superb part for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, uninspired place with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to encounter the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous resident, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy silver-years stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories 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 Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the title.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary period of glory.