fellow students for an "electrifying" performance in the lead role of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Theatre career On graduation from LAMDA Collins joined the Chesterfield Civic Theatre's Repertory Company in 1971, moving to the company of the Citizen’s Theatre, in Glasgow in 1972 under the director Giles Havergal. While in Glasgow he also taught deaf and mute children mobility skills, learning British sign language so he could communicate with them, later saying that this was the most satisfying work that he had done in his life. In 1972, he appeared in seven plays in Glasgow including the lead in Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great. He then went with Havergal on an acting teaching tour with the Prospect Theatre Company in the United States and Canada, before returning to the British Isles to appear in London's West End, starring in City Sugar and The Threepenny Opera, and at the Royal Court Theatre in the play The Farm in 1973, directed by Lindsay Anderson. After moving into film acting in the mid-1970s, he intermittently returned to the stage throughout his career. He performed in a pantomime of Babes in the Wood at the King's Theatre in Southsea in Christmas 1983. In the mid-1990s he performed in an English provincial tour of the play Who killed Agatha Christie by Tudor Gates. His last performance in theatre was a 1999–2000 provincial tour in the English Midlands of J.B. Priestley's Dangerous Corner. Move into television While appearing in The Farm at the Royal Court in 1973 Collins received an offer for his first television role in the British Broadcasting Corporation's police drama Z Cars. His first major television role was in Granada Television's comedy series The Cuckoo Waltz from 1975 to 1977 in the role of Gavin Rumsey, alongside his landlord played by David Roper and landlady Diane Keen, whom his character was constantly trying to seduce. By the mid-1970s he was regularly appearing on British television dramas in multiple roles. The Professionals (1977–1983) In 1976, the dramatist and television producer Brian Clemens wrote a new British television crime-action drama series entitled The Professionals, modelled on the success of the hit American television series Starsky and Hutch. It was also intended to be a more realistic follow-up to a prior successful television series that he had just produced about government agents entitled The New Avengers. As with the previous series, Clemens planned to have a split