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During the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a familiar star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic comedy with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to experience the real thing outside the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous local, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level maid.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying older-age films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the movie's title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable period of glory.