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During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a recognisable star on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, optimistic comedy with a excellent character for a older actress, tackling the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster film version. This very much mirrored the alike path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her 40s in a dull, uninspired nation with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to encounter the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish resident, Costas, played with an bold mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively career on the theater and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying older-age films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and 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 true funny character (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.