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During the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a well-known figure on both sides of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y story with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her 40s in a boring, uninspired nation with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the unexciting English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to live the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming native, Costas, played with an striking facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on television, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a author in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental elderly films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic hinted at by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.