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During the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a familiar celebrity on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of women's desires that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

The story began from Collins performing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity country with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to encounter the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming native, Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s thinking. It received huge chuckles in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to us: “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 TV, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there seemed not to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental elderly films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller hinted at by the title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.