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In the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a familiar celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic comedy with a superb character for a older actress, tackling the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is weary with existence in her 40s in a boring, lacking creativity country with monotonous, dull people. So when she wins the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to encounter the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous native, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively work on the stage and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying silver-years entertainments about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller alluded to by the title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous period of glory.