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During the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a well-known celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, 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.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic comedy with a wonderful role for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She turned into the star of London theater and Broadway and was then successfully cast in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her 40s in a tedious, lacking creativity place with boring, dull folk. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to live the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish resident, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years entertainments about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant hinted at by the title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.