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During the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a well-known figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic story with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

This iconic role anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely followed the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired place with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she gets the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to experience the real thing away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous local, the character Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental older-age films about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the film's name.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.