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In the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a recognisable figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, 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: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, bright comedy with a superb part for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This very much followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her 40s in a tedious, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to experience the real thing beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous native, the character Costas, played with an striking mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the cinema where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the class of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy silver-years stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic hinted at by the title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable time to shine.