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In the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a familiar celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent character for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with life in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity nation with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the chance at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to live the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous local, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on TV, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy silver-years films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous period of glory.