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In the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She developed into a recognisable figure on both sides of the sea thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, humorous, optimistic comedy with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She turned into the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a boring, unimaginative nation with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to experience the real thing outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the mischievous local, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking moustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively work on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy silver-years entertainments about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller referenced by the film's name.

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