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During the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a familiar celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent part for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely followed the alike transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, uninspired country with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to live the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous local, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively career on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary time to shine.