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In the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played 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 Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic story with a superb part for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.

This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster film version. This closely paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a dull, uninspired nation with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – continues once it’s over to encounter the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the charming native, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker 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 manner, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying silver-years stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable period of glory.