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During the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a recognisable figure on each side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic film with a excellent character for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

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

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins playing the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

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

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative country with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to experience the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the charming native, the character Costas, played with an bold mustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned big laughs in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active career on the theater and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy elderly films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.