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During the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a recognisable star on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, bright comedy with a superb role for a older actress, broaching the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins performing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative nation with boring, predictable folk. So when she receives the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to live the real thing away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous resident, Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

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

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental elderly stories about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.