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In the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a well-known celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, comical, optimistic story with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

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

Originating on Stage to Film

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This largely paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a boring, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to experience the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming local, the character Costas, played with an bold facial hair and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying silver-years films about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, 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 the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic referenced by the film's name.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous time to shine.