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In the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She developed into a familiar celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, sunshine-y story with a excellent role for a older actress, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

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

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit film version. This very much mirrored the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity country with monotonous, predictable individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to experience the real thing outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish resident, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years films about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic alluded to by the title.

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