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During the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a well-known celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, comical, bright comedy with a superb character for a older actress, broaching the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully cast in the highly successful film version. This very much mirrored the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired country with boring, dull folk. So when she gets the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to encounter the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming resident, Costas, acted with an bold moustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying elderly entertainments about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic alluded to by the film's name.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.