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During the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a familiar star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, bright story with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the highly successful film version. This largely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her middle age in a boring, unimaginative place with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish native, the character Costas, played with an bold facial hair and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and cloying older-age films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary time to shine.