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In the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a familiar figure on each side of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, funny, bright film with a superb character for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit film version. This very much paralleled the alike path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with life in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired nation with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to live the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming native, Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy elderly entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous period of glory.