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In the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a familiar celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic film with a excellent role for a older actress, addressing the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins performing the starring part of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much followed the comparable path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity country with boring, dull folk. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to experience the authentic life away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming native, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there appeared not to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata drama, 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 director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy silver-years entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller hinted at by the movie's title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.