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During the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a recognisable star on each side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright comedy with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

This iconic role anticipated the emerging discussion about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with existence in her forties in a boring, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s over to encounter the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming resident, Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

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

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (though a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.