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In the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a well-known figure on both sides of the sea thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic comedy with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, broaching the topic of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely followed the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with life in her 40s in a dull, uninspired country with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to encounter the real thing outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous native, Costas, played with an striking mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the theater and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a author in the class of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

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

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous period of glory.