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In the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a recognisable star on both sides of the sea thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic story with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of women's desires that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is weary with life in her forties in a boring, lacking creativity place with monotonous, predictable people. So when she receives the opportunity at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming local, the character Costas, played with an bold facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a below-stairs maid.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy older-age stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

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