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In the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a familiar figure on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y story with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely paralleled the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is weary with life in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to encounter the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish resident, the character Costas, played with an outrageous mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s decent set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental older-age stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous period of glory.