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In the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a well-known figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, comical, optimistic film with a superb part for a seasoned performer, addressing the subject of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins performing the main character of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster film version. This very much mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with life in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative place with boring, unimaginative people. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to encounter the genuine culture away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish resident, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and syrupy elderly films about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen offered 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 referenced by the movie's title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.