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In the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a familiar figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, funny, sunshine-y story with a wonderful part for a older actress, addressing the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

From Stage to Film

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the highly successful film version. This very much mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity place with boring, dull people. So when she receives the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to live the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous native, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and cloying older-age stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.