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In the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a familiar figure on both sides of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y film with a excellent character for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Film

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the smash-hit film version. This largely paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her forties in a tedious, uninspired nation with boring, predictable people. So when she gets the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to live the genuine culture away from the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous native, Costas, acted with an bold mustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the stage and on television, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy silver-years films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like 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 Brief Return in Humor

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit 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 tremendous time to shine.