🔗 Share this article

During the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming performer. She developed into a familiar celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y film with a superb part for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

It started from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much followed the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with life in her forties in a dull, unimaginative nation with boring, predictable individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to encounter the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous native, Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy older-age stories about old people, 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 Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant hinted at by the film's name.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.