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In the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a well-known celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice adventure set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, humorous, sunshine-y story with a wonderful part for a older actress, broaching the subject of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with life in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative place with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s gone with – continues once it’s over to encounter the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming resident, the character Costas, played with an bold mustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It received loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active career on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

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

However, she discovered herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy older-age entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

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

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.