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During the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She became a recognisable celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y story with a superb part for a seasoned performer, addressing the subject of women's desires that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway midlife comedy.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely followed the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative place with monotonous, unimaginative people. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s gone with – continues once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming resident, the character Costas, acted with an striking moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively career on the theater and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in director 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 class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy elderly stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (though a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the title.

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