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During the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a well-known star on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that audiences adored, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her middle age in a boring, unimaginative place with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to encounter the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish native, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy elderly entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the film's name.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary period of glory.