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During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a smart, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a recognisable figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, humorous, optimistic comedy with a wonderful role for a older actress, addressing the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

From Stage to Film

It started from Collins performing the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative nation with boring, dull folk. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to live the authentic life away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish resident, Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active career on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and syrupy silver-years entertainments about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller alluded to by the film's name.

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