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During the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a recognisable star on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice adventure opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y film with a excellent character for a older actress, addressing the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This very much followed the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative country with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the unexciting English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to experience the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish native, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying older-age stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like 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 Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous period of glory.