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During the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a familiar celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright comedy with a superb part for a older actress, broaching the subject of women's desires that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a boring, unimaginative place with boring, unimaginative people. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – continues once it’s over to live the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively work on the theater and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there seemed not to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs maid.

But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying older-age films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous period of glory.