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In the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a recognisable star on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, comical, optimistic story with a wonderful role for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

From Stage to Film

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the alike path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a dull, uninspired country with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to experience the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the charming native, the character Costas, acted with an bold mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on TV, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying older-age entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories 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 the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable period of glory.