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During the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a familiar figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that audiences adored, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic film with a wonderful part for a older actress, tackling the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful film version. This largely paralleled the alike transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is weary with existence in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s finished to live the real thing away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish resident, the character Costas, played with an striking facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the movie's title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.