In the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a recognisable celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.
She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.
Yet the highlight of greatness came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic story with a excellent character for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.
This iconic role prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.
It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.
She turned into the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the alike path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.
Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a tedious, lacking creativity country with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to experience the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming resident, Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.
Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”
After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a author in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.
She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs maid.
Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy older-age films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.
Director Woody Allen did give 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 shady fortune teller alluded to by the film's name.
Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.
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