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During the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a recognisable figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that audiences adored, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y film with a excellent character for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the celebrity of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with existence in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to encounter the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the roguish resident, Costas, acted with an striking mustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on television, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and cloying silver-years films about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Director Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.