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In the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a recognisable figure on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a superb character for a seasoned performer, addressing the subject of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of London theater and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her forties in a tedious, uninspired country with monotonous, predictable people. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended 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 bold moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active work on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there appeared not to be a author in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous time to shine.