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In the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a well-known star on each side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic film with a superb role for a seasoned performer, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins performing the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This closely followed the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a boring, uninspired country with boring, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to encounter the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous native, the character Costas, played with an bold facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy elderly entertainments about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

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