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During the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a well-known figure on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, funny, bright film with a superb role for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

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

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful film version. This very much mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with life in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity country with boring, predictable people. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to encounter the real thing away from the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish native, Costas, acted with an bold moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy elderly films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.