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During the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic comedy with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her 40s in a boring, lacking creativity place with boring, unimaginative people. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in Greece, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to live the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming local, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s feeling. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy silver-years stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

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