The Shirley Valentine Role Provided This Talented Actress a Character to Match Her Talent. She Embraced It with Style and Glee

During the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a familiar celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y story with a superb role for a older actress, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

This iconic role prefigured the new debate about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Film

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with existence in her forties in a boring, unimaginative nation with uninteresting, predictable people. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the charming resident, Costas, played with an striking mustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age films about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous period of glory.