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In the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a recognisable star on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, bright comedy with a wonderful character for a older actress, broaching the theme of feminine sensuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the star of London theater and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit film version. This very much followed the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her middle age in a dull, uninspired nation with monotonous, dull people. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to encounter the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous native, Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively work on the stage and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and syrupy elderly entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen did give 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 fortune teller alluded to by the title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.