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In the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a well-known celebrity on each side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, optimistic story with a superb character for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely followed the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her middle age in a boring, uninspired place with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous native, the character Costas, played with an bold moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s adequate Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable time to shine.