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In the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a familiar figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, humorous, sunshine-y film with a superb part for a older actress, broaching the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Film

It originated from Collins performing the main character of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This closely followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative place with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the chance at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to live the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish native, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active career on the theater and on TV, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying silver-years films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

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