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During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y film with a excellent character for a seasoned performer, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative place with boring, predictable individuals. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s over to experience the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish resident, Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs maid.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy elderly entertainments about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the film's name.

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