🔗 Share this article

During the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, funny, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a well-known figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, sunshine-y story with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This largely followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with life in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity country with monotonous, predictable people. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to live the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish resident, Costas, played with an striking facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 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 went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and syrupy elderly stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, 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 Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary time to shine.