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During the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, funny, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a well-known star on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, bright story with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit film version. This largely followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative country with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to live the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous local, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and cloying elderly stories about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.