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In the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a recognisable figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic film with a wonderful part for a older actress, broaching the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the highly successful film version. This very much paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative nation with boring, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to experience the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish local, the character Costas, acted with an bold moustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s feeling. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively work on the theater and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age stories about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant hinted at by the title.

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