🔗 Share this article

During the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a familiar figure on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, bright story with a superb role for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

This iconic role anticipated the new debate about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit film version. This very much paralleled the alike path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative country with boring, dull individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous local, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy elderly entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films 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 Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the film's name.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.