🔗 Share this article

In the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a well-known star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, extending into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, bright film with a superb part for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

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

Collins became the star of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with life in her middle age in a boring, unimaginative place with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the mischievous native, the character Costas, acted with an bold moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy silver-years entertainments about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Director 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 alluded to by the title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary period of glory.