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In the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a familiar star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, bright story with a superb character for a seasoned performer, addressing the subject of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster film version. This largely paralleled the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative place with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to encounter the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the charming native, Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy silver-years stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

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