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In the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a familiar star on each side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y story with a wonderful part for a mature female lead, broaching the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful film version. This very much paralleled the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with life in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative country with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the chance at a no-cost trip in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to live the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous local, Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying older-age stories about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Director Woody Allen did give 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 referenced by the film's name.

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