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In the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a clever, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y story with a excellent character for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

This iconic role anticipated the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely followed the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her middle age in a boring, uninspired place with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the chance at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to experience the genuine culture outside the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the charming local, Costas, acted with an striking mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the class of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

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

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying older-age stories about old people, 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 Minor Role in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (although a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller referenced by the film's name.

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