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During the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a well-known celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, bright story with a excellent character for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the celebrity of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully cast in the blockbuster film version. This largely followed the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with boring, predictable folk. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to encounter the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, acted with an striking moustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic referenced by the film's name.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.