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During the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic comedy with a superb role for a older actress, broaching the theme of feminine sensuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful film version. This closely mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is weary with existence in her forties in a boring, unimaginative nation with boring, dull people. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to encounter the real thing away from the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous local, Costas, played with an bold moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there appeared not to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying silver-years films about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.