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During the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a familiar star on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, comical, optimistic story with a superb role for a older actress, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a boring, uninspired nation with uninteresting, dull people. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to live the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming local, Costas, acted with an bold facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the theater and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served 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 starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous period of glory.