🔗 Share this article

During the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a recognisable celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, bright comedy with a excellent part for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster film version. This largely followed the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she gets the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to experience the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming native, Costas, played with an outrageous mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy older-age entertainments about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable period of glory.