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In the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a recognisable figure on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright story with a wonderful role for a older actress, tackling the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of the West End and Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the alike path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with life in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative place with boring, dull folk. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to live the genuine culture beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous local, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on television, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a author in the class of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller alluded to by the film's name.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable period of glory.