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In the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a familiar figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, sunshine-y story with a superb character for a older actress, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This closely followed the similar path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative place with monotonous, predictable individuals. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture beyond the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish local, the character Costas, acted with an striking mustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and cloying older-age stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller referenced by the movie's title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.