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In the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a familiar figure on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice journey set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, bright story with a excellent character for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the new debate about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely followed the similar path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her middle age in a boring, unimaginative nation with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – continues once it’s over to experience the genuine culture outside the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s feeling. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and cloying silver-years films about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the movie's title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable period of glory.