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During the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a well-known star on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y story with a excellent character for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the new debate about women's health and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster film version. This largely paralleled the similar path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a boring, lacking creativity nation with boring, predictable people. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to live the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the roguish native, Costas, played with an bold moustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively career on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the movies where there seemed not to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set drama, 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 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental elderly films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the film's name.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary period of glory.