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During the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a well-known star on both sides of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, bright comedy with a superb role for a mature female lead, broaching the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Film

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative country with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s finished to live the genuine culture beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous native, Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and overly sentimental older-age films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary period of glory.