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In the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a familiar celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic story with a wonderful role for a older actress, tackling the subject of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful film version. This closely paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative place with boring, predictable folk. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting English traveler she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to experience the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish resident, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the film's name.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous period of glory.