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In the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a well-known star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice journey set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y story with a wonderful part for a older actress, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the new debate about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit film version. This closely paralleled the alike path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity place with boring, unimaginative people. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to live the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming native, the character Costas, played with an striking facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a author in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level maid.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying older-age films 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 ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give 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 hinted at by the film's name.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.