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In the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a familiar figure on both sides of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, bright story with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of women's desires that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful film version. This largely paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a tedious, uninspired place with boring, predictable folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming resident, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on television, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a author in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy elderly entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable period of glory.