🔗 Share this article

In the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a well-known celebrity on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a superb character for a older actress, broaching the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful film version. This very much paralleled the alike transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her 40s in a boring, uninspired country with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to experience the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish resident, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on television, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental elderly films about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic hinted at by the movie's title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.