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In the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a well-known celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic story with a wonderful character for a older actress, tackling the topic of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is weary with existence in her forties in a tedious, uninspired country with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to live the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming local, Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and syrupy silver-years stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

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

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