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In the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She grew into a well-known star on each side of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, bright story with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

From Stage to Film

It started from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully cast in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her forties in a tedious, lacking creativity country with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to encounter the real thing away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish native, Costas, acted with an striking moustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a author in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable period of glory.