🔗 Share this article

During the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a well-known figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, comical, bright film with a superb role for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster film version. This closely paralleled the alike path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative nation with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s finished to experience the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming resident, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy elderly entertainments about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Filmmaker 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 clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

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