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During the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a familiar star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic story with a superb character for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely paralleled the similar path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with existence in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to experience the genuine culture beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming native, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy older-age entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

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