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In the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Screen

The story began from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully cast in the blockbuster film version. This very much paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired place with monotonous, dull folk. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to live the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the charming native, Costas, acted with an bold moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active career on the theater and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous time to shine.