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During the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She became a recognisable star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic comedy with a superb character for a older actress, addressing the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an getaway midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with existence in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative nation with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she wins the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s finished to experience the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish native, Costas, played with an striking moustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active work on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in dismissive and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary period of glory.