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During the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a recognisable celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y story with a excellent part for a older actress, broaching the theme of women's desires that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her forties in a boring, uninspired place with monotonous, predictable people. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to experience the real thing away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous native, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental silver-years stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant referenced by the title.

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