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In the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a recognisable star on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that the public loved, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, bright film with a superb part for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit film version. This largely mirrored the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with life in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative place with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to experience the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the charming local, Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy older-age films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable period of glory.