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In the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a recognisable celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y film with a superb character for a older actress, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative country with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to experience the authentic life beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous local, the character Costas, played with an striking moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy elderly stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic alluded to by the title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary period of glory.