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During the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a recognisable star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, bright film with a superb character for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her forties in a dull, uninspired place with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s finished to live the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s feeling. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active work on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the caliber of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and syrupy silver-years films about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous period of glory.