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During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a recognisable figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, bright comedy with a wonderful role for a seasoned performer, addressing the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about perimenopause and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Film

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful film version. This very much paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with life in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity place with boring, predictable people. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture outside the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish local, Costas, portrayed with an striking moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic referenced by the title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary time to shine.