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In the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a well-known figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, comical, bright story with a superb part for a older actress, addressing the subject of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, dull people. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in Greece, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to live the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish native, Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the theater and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the film's name.

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