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In the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y story with a superb part for a older actress, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Film

The story began from Collins playing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely followed the comparable path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a tedious, lacking creativity place with boring, dull folk. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s over to encounter the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming native, the character Costas, played with an bold mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s feeling. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.