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During the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a recognisable star on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, comical, bright film with a wonderful part for a older actress, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely mirrored the similar path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with life in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative country with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she gets the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture outside the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the roguish resident, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively work on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy silver-years stories about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable period of glory.