🔗 Share this article

In the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a well-known celebrity on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic story with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Film

It started from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her forties in a boring, unimaginative nation with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the mischievous native, Costas, played with an bold moustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

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

However, she discovered herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental silver-years stories about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.