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In the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a recognisable star on each 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 pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic story with a superb part for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful film version. This closely paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is weary with existence in her 40s in a boring, lacking creativity country with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to live the real thing outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous local, Costas, played with an bold moustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s thinking. It received huge chuckles in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a manner, to the class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying older-age stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film 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 Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the film's name.

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