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During the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a recognisable star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing story paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, comical, bright film with a superb part for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

She turned into the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster film version. This closely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with existence in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity place with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to experience the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish native, Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active work on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs maid.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying silver-years entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the movie's title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous time to shine.