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In the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a well-known star on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright comedy with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully selected in the highly successful film version. This very much mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative nation with boring, dull individuals. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to experience the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming resident, the character Costas, played with an outrageous mustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks 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 TV, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying elderly stories about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic alluded to by the film's name.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.