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In the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a well-known celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, comical, optimistic comedy with a wonderful part for a older actress, broaching the topic of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit film version. This closely followed the comparable transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity place with boring, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the chance at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to live the genuine culture outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous local, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy silver-years stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Director Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the title.

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