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In the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a well-known celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright comedy with a excellent role for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, uninspired nation with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming local, Costas, played with an striking moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Dr 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 was in director Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic referenced by the title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.