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During the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a familiar star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the good-looking 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 No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y story with a excellent character for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of feminine sensuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This largely paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her forties in a tedious, lacking creativity country with monotonous, unimaginative people. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming resident, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively work on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and overly sentimental older-age 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 poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller alluded to by the film's name.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.