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In the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a familiar star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic comedy with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about youthful innocence.

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

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully cast in the highly successful film version. This very much mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her 40s in a boring, uninspired nation with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to experience the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on TV, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level maid.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy silver-years entertainments about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller alluded to by the title.

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