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In the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a familiar figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, bright comedy with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful film version. This very much mirrored the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her middle age in a boring, unimaginative country with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the unexciting English traveler she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to encounter the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming resident, Costas, portrayed with an bold mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively career on the stage and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and cloying older-age films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller referenced by the film's name.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary period of glory.