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During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a recognisable star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic comedy with a superb part for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

She turned into the star of London theater and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely followed the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with life in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative country with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to live the genuine culture beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous native, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs maid.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and cloying older-age films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the title.

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