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During the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a well-known celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice adventure opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright comedy with a excellent role for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of feminine sensuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a an era in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the highly successful film version. This largely followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is weary with life in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative nation with monotonous, dull folk. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming local, Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active career on the theater and on the small screen, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and syrupy 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 the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the title.

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