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In the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a familiar celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic story with a excellent role for a older actress, broaching the theme of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the alike path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative country with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to live the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous native, the character Costas, played with an bold facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively 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 didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying elderly films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the film's name.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.