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In the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a well-known star on both sides of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice journey set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, bright story with a superb character for a mature female lead, broaching the topic of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her middle age in a boring, unimaginative place with monotonous, dull people. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to experience the authentic life away from the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming resident, Costas, acted with an striking moustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a below-stairs maid.

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

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller referenced by the film's name.

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