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In the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a familiar figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, humorous, optimistic comedy with a superb character for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Film

The story began from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

She turned into the star of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with life in her middle age in a boring, uninspired country with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the unexciting English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to experience the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the charming native, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age stories about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Director 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 clairvoyant referenced by the film's name.

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