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In the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a well-known figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, optimistic comedy with a superb character for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins playing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the celebrity of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a dull, unimaginative country with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to experience the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the roguish resident, Costas, played with an striking mustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and overly sentimental elderly films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the film's name.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.