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In the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a well-known figure on each side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was 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. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic comedy with a superb role for a seasoned performer, addressing the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative place with monotonous, predictable people. So when she receives the chance at a no-cost trip in Greece, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish resident, Costas, acted with an bold mustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on television, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there seemed not to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying older-age stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the film's name.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.