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During the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a familiar figure on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright comedy with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an fantasy midlife comedy.

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

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is weary with life in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish resident, Costas, portrayed with an striking moustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

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

She starred in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a downstairs maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental elderly stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant hinted at by the film's name.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable period of glory.