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During the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a familiar celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y story with a excellent role for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy midlife comedy.

Collins became the star of London theater and Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster film version. This closely paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with life in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative place with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming native, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively career on the theater and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there appeared not to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and syrupy silver-years stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the film's name.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary time to shine.