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During the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a recognisable star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic comedy with a excellent character for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a boring, uninspired country with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to experience the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively career on the theater and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there appeared not to be a author in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy silver-years entertainments about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (though a brief appearance) 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, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary period of glory.