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In the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a well-known star on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic story with a wonderful role for a seasoned performer, addressing the subject of women's desires that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is weary with life in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity place with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s finished to live the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the roguish native, Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s pondering. It earned big laughs in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the theater and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and syrupy silver-years entertainments about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker 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 questionable psychic hinted at by the movie's title.

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