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In the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a well-known celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, humorous, optimistic film with a wonderful character for a older actress, broaching the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her 40s in a dull, uninspired nation with monotonous, dull folk. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to live the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming native, Costas, acted with an bold moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred 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 Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying older-age stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the film's name.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.