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During the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a familiar star on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, bright comedy with a wonderful role for a older actress, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative country with boring, predictable folk. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish native, the character Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on TV, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable 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 Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, 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 movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

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 dodgy psychic referenced by the title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous period of glory.