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During the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, bright film with a superb part for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her forties in a tedious, lacking creativity place with monotonous, predictable people. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, acted with an bold mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the theater and on the small screen, including parts 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 Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata 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 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a below-stairs maid.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and overly sentimental elderly films about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

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

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