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In the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright story with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.

This iconic role prefigured the new debate about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much followed the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with life in her middle age in a dull, uninspired place with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the unexciting English traveler she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to experience the genuine culture beyond the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively work on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

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