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During the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a familiar star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, comical, optimistic film with a superb character for a seasoned performer, addressing the subject of women's desires that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

She turned into the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much followed the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, 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 40s in a dull, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to live the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the roguish native, the character Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy older-age films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the film's name.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous time to shine.