🔗 Share this article

During the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She became a recognisable star on both sides of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, optimistic film with a excellent role for a older actress, tackling the subject of women's desires that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative nation with boring, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture away from the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous local, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying older-age entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Director Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though a brief appearance) 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 extraordinary moment in the sun.