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In the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on each side of the sea 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 parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright film with a superb role for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with life in her 40s in a boring, lacking creativity nation with monotonous, dull folk. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to encounter the real thing away from the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the charming resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold mustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker 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 Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental elderly films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the title.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary period of glory.