The Shirley Valentine Role Provided This Talented Actress a Part to Match Her Skill. She Grasped It with Elegance and Delight

In the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a familiar celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice adventure set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y story with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of women's desires that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about perimenopause and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative country with uninteresting, predictable people. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the charming local, the character Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively career on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level maid.

But she found herself often chosen in condescending and syrupy elderly entertainments about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Director 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 clairvoyant hinted at by the title.

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