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During the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a familiar star on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y film with a superb character for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of women's desires that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This very much followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her middle age in a dull, uninspired country with boring, dull people. So when she wins the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the unexciting English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to experience the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the roguish native, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s feeling. It received huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying older-age entertainments about the aged, 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 set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the film's name.

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