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In the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a recognisable figure on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, bright comedy with a excellent part for a older actress, broaching the subject of women's desires that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an getaway midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with life in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative country with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s finished to experience the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming local, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on TV, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy older-age films about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie 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 Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller referenced by the film's name.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable period of glory.