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During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a familiar celebrity on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, 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 handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, comical, bright comedy with a superb role for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Screen

The story began from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the toast of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster film version. This closely paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative country with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to live the genuine culture away from the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish local, Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy elderly films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

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