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In the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a recognisable celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, comical, optimistic comedy with a superb part for a older actress, addressing the topic of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the alike path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a boring, unimaginative place with monotonous, unimaginative people. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to experience the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish local, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It received huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying elderly stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.