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During the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a well-known celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright comedy with a excellent character for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Film

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the smash-hit film version. This closely paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired country with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to experience the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying elderly films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary period of glory.