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During the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a recognisable figure on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y film with a superb part for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Film

It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This largely followed the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is weary with life in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative nation with monotonous, unimaginative people. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to live the genuine culture outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish local, the character Costas, played with an striking facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on television, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller hinted at by the title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.