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In the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a well-known star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright film with a excellent role for a older actress, broaching the topic of feminine sensuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role prefigured the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster film version. This largely paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with life in her forties in a dull, unimaginative country with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to live the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish local, the character Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the theater and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and cloying elderly entertainments about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

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