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During the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a recognisable celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular English program 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 questionable history. Her character had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, comical, bright film with a wonderful role for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of feminine sensuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She turned into the toast of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her 40s in a boring, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, predictable people. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to encounter the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the mischievous local, the character Costas, acted with an striking moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In 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 servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying silver-years stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic hinted at by the movie's title.

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