In the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a smart, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.
She played Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.
However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright story with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.
Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.
It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an getaway midlife comedy.
She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.
Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to live the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous local, Costas, played with an striking moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.
Sassy, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”
Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the movies where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.
She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a below-stairs maid.
But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy silver-years films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.
Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the film's name.
But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous period of glory.
Film critic and industry analyst with a passion for uncovering cinematic trends and storytelling techniques.
