🔗 Share this article

During the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a well-known celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic film with a excellent role for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role anticipated the new debate about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins performing the main character of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the celebrity of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much followed the alike path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her forties in a dull, uninspired country with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, played with an striking mustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental elderly stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

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