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In the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a recognisable star on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, comical, bright comedy with a excellent part for a older actress, broaching the topic of feminine sensuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s ended to live the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the charming resident, Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively career on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and cloying older-age stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (albeit a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

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