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During the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, funny, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a well-known celebrity on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership 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: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a superb role for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

This iconic role prefigured the emerging discussion about perimenopause and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the toast of London theater and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative place with boring, dull individuals. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s finished to experience the genuine culture beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the charming resident, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s feeling. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in condescending and syrupy elderly entertainments about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary time to shine.