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During the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, funny, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a well-known star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, bright comedy with a excellent role for a older actress, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about perimenopause and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the toast of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful film version. This closely paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with existence in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired place with uninteresting, predictable people. So when she gets the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous resident, Costas, acted with an bold facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy older-age entertainments 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 ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary time to shine.