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During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a well-known star on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic story with a superb character for a older actress, tackling the theme of women's desires that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is weary with daily routine in her forties in a dull, unimaginative country with boring, predictable folk. So when she receives the chance at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s ended to experience the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous native, Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years entertainments about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Director Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

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