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In the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She became a familiar figure on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic story with a superb character for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with life in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative country with boring, unimaginative people. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to live the real thing away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish resident, the character Costas, played with an outrageous mustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active work on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary period of glory.