🔗 Share this article

In the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a well-known celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic story with a superb role for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of women's desires that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her middle age in a boring, unimaginative place with boring, predictable individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to experience the real thing away from the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming local, Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active career on the theater and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy older-age films about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.