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In the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a well-known figure on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, funny, sunshine-y story with a superb character for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is weary with life in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative nation with monotonous, predictable people. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in Greece, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish native, Costas, played with an bold moustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a servant-level maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age films about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.