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In the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a familiar star on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic comedy with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

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

Starting in Theater to Screen

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This largely paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity place with boring, predictable individuals. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s finished to live the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming local, Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Director Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.

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