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During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She developed into a recognisable star on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright comedy with a excellent role for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of women's desires that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful film version. This closely paralleled the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity nation with monotonous, dull people. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to live the genuine culture away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish resident, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and syrupy silver-years films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film 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 Brief Return in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the title.

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