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During the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a recognisable celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic comedy with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of women's desires that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely followed the alike path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with life in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired place with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s finished to experience the authentic life beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish native, Costas, played with an striking moustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on the small screen, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs maid.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and overly sentimental elderly films 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 ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the film's name.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable time to shine.