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During the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a recognisable star on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, bright comedy with a superb part for a older actress, tackling the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the celebrity of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the similar path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative country with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the charming local, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold mustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively work on the theater and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs maid.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and overly sentimental older-age entertainments about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, 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 Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic referenced by the film's name.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable period of glory.