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During the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a familiar figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a superb role for a seasoned performer, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the smash-hit film version. This very much mirrored the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity nation with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to live the authentic life beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish resident, Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the stage and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age films about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.