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In the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, humorous, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a well-known figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic story with a superb part for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the celebrity of London theater and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with daily routine in her forties in a dull, uninspired nation with boring, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to live the authentic life beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years entertainments about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Director Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the title.

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