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During the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, witty, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a familiar celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, comical, bright comedy with a wonderful role for a older actress, broaching the subject of women's desires that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely followed the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired nation with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to experience the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming local, Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the stage and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying 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 Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.