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In the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic comedy with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

This iconic role prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster film version. This very much paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired place with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to live the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish resident, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively work on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, 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 overly sentimental elderly films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous period of glory.