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During the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a recognisable figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y film with a superb role for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit film version. This closely mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative place with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s gone with – continues once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming native, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable period of glory.