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During the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a recognisable figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful part for a older actress, broaching the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity country with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s finished to live the genuine culture beyond the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish local, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and cloying older-age films 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 Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.