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During the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a recognisable figure on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, bright story with a excellent character for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully selected in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is weary with life in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative nation with boring, unimaginative people. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to experience the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish local, Costas, played with an bold moustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active career on the theater and on TV, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and syrupy elderly entertainments about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant referenced by the film's name.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.