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In the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a familiar star on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, comical, bright comedy with a wonderful part for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her 40s in a boring, uninspired nation with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to experience the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous resident, Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s thinking. It got loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career 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 class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and cloying silver-years entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the title.

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