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In the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a recognisable star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic comedy with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of women's desires that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the toast of London theater and Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit film version. This closely paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her forties in a dull, unimaginative nation with boring, dull individuals. So when she gets the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to experience the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous local, Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s feeling. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively career on the stage and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.