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During the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a well-known star on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, bright story with a excellent role for a older actress, tackling the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the highly successful film version. This very much followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative place with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to experience the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous resident, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy older-age stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller referenced by the title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.