🔗 Share this article

During the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a recognisable figure on each side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, bright comedy with a superb part for a older actress, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit film version. This closely followed the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with existence in her middle age in a dull, uninspired place with monotonous, unimaginative people. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting English traveler she’s gone with – continues once it’s finished to encounter the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the charming local, the character Costas, played with an bold moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively career on the theater and on TV, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.