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In the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a recognisable star on each side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice adventure opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, humorous, sunshine-y story with a wonderful role for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity nation with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming native, the character Costas, played with an striking moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active work on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a author in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s adequate Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy older-age entertainments about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary time to shine.