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During the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a familiar figure on both sides of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, humorous, optimistic film with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, broaching the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Film

The story began from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely followed the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired country with boring, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to live the real thing away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish resident, Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively work on the theater and on television, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years entertainments about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the title.

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