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During the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a well-known star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a superb part for a older actress, broaching the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

This iconic role prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, unimaginative nation with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to experience the real thing away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the roguish resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s thinking. It got loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the theater and on television, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata 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 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a servant-level maid.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and syrupy older-age stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic alluded to by the title.

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