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In the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a familiar celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y film with a superb role for a older actress, addressing the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative place with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to experience the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous native, Costas, acted with an striking moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s feeling. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level maid.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas 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 Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

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