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During the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming female actor. She grew into a well-known figure on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, bright story with a excellent role for a mature female lead, broaching the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Film

It originated from Collins playing the main character 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 escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the highly successful film version. This largely paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – continues once it’s over to encounter the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish native, Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy older-age films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the title.

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