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In the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a familiar celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of London theater and Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much followed the comparable path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative country with monotonous, predictable people. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – continues once it’s over to experience the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish native, Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s thinking. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a servant-level maid.

But she found herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental older-age stories about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable time to shine.