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During the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a familiar figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a superb character for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an fantasy midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming local, Costas, portrayed with an bold mustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s feeling. It earned big laughs in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and syrupy elderly stories about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (though a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the film's name.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary time to shine.