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In the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a well-known celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, bright film with a excellent character for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

This iconic role anticipated the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Screen

The story began from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster film version. This closely mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired place with monotonous, dull people. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to live the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the charming resident, Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively career on the stage and on television, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there seemed not to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy older-age entertainments about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Director Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant hinted at by the title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary period of glory.