🔗 Share this article

In the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a recognisable star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic comedy with a superb part for a older actress, tackling the theme of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Screen

The story began from Collins taking on the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster film version. This closely followed the alike path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her 40s in a dull, uninspired place with uninteresting, predictable people. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s ended to encounter the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the charming resident, the character Costas, played with an bold moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active career on the theater and on TV, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy elderly stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable time to shine.