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During the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a recognisable figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, bright story with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

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

Originating on Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative nation with boring, predictable folk. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to experience the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish resident, Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the theater and on TV, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

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

A Small Comeback in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous time to shine.