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During the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic comedy with a excellent part for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This very much followed the alike path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, dull people. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s ended to live the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish local, the character Costas, acted with an striking mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively career on the theater and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a author in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age stories 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 subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller hinted at by the title.

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