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In the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a familiar figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful role for a older actress, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is weary with existence in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to encounter the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous native, the character Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Director Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the movie's title.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary time to shine.