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In the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a familiar star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic film with a excellent part for a older actress, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the new debate about perimenopause and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins playing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This closely followed the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to live the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous local, the character Costas, played with an striking moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively career on the stage and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and cloying elderly stories about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a brief appearance) 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 remarkable time to shine.