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In the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a familiar celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic film with a superb character for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, uninspired nation with boring, predictable individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to encounter the real thing outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the roguish resident, Costas, played with an striking facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active work on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

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

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary period of glory.