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During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a well-known celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y story with a wonderful character for a older actress, broaching the theme of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She turned into the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the alike path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is weary with life in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to live the authentic life away from the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the mischievous local, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and cloying elderly entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

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