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In the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a familiar figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, bright comedy with a excellent character for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of women's desires that did not conform by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Film

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She turned into the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit film version. This largely paralleled the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired place with monotonous, dull people. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the real thing away from the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous native, Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying elderly stories about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.