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In the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a well-known figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright film with a excellent character for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster film version. This closely paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired country with uninteresting, predictable people. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – continues once it’s over to experience the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish native, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level maid.

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying silver-years stories about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

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

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary time to shine.