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In the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a familiar star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Film

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity place with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming local, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It received 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?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively work on the stage and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy elderly entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (though a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.