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In the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright comedy with a superb character for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely followed the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a tedious, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to live the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous native, Costas, played with an bold mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, 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.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying silver-years stories 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 subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic alluded to by the title.

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