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During the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a familiar celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic story with a excellent role for a older actress, broaching the theme of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster film version. This closely mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her forties in a dull, unimaginative place with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the charming local, the character Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a below-stairs maid.

But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.