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During the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a familiar figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that audiences adored, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, bright film with a superb character for a older actress, tackling the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Film

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely paralleled the alike path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity nation with boring, dull folk. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to live the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the charming native, the character Costas, acted with an striking mustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active work on the stage and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy older-age stories about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Director Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.