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In the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a familiar star on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, bright film with a superb part for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

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

She was hailed as the celebrity of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired place with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to live the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish native, the character Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively work on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a author in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying silver-years stories 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 Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic referenced by the film's name.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary period of glory.