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In the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a well-known figure on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, funny, bright comedy with a superb role for a older actress, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful film version. This largely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired country with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous resident, Costas, portrayed with an bold facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

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

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying older-age stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic hinted at by the title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous period of glory.