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During the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice adventure set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic film with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London theater and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the highly successful film version. This largely mirrored the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – continues once it’s finished to live the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the mischievous local, Costas, played with an bold facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on TV, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental silver-years films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

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