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In the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y story with a wonderful role for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative place with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the genuine culture beyond the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish native, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively work on the stage and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided setting in which she played a servant-level maid.

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying silver-years films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the title.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.