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During the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a familiar star on both sides of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y film with a wonderful part for a older actress, tackling the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity country with boring, unimaginative people. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming resident, the character Costas, played with an striking moustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy elderly films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas 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 Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

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