🔗 Share this article

In the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a familiar figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful character for a older actress, addressing the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster film version. This largely mirrored the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative place with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in Greece, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish native, the character Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s thinking. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs maid.

But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying silver-years films about old people, 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 movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic hinted at by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.