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In the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She became a recognisable figure 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 portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y film with a wonderful role for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she gets the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to experience the real thing outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish native, Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental older-age entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

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