🔗 Share this article

In the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a well-known star on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, optimistic film with a superb role for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with life in her 40s in a tedious, lacking creativity country with boring, predictable folk. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to encounter the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous local, Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and cloying older-age entertainments about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic alluded to by the film's name.

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