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In the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a well-known figure on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, sunshine-y story with a superb part for a older actress, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit film version. This closely followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her forties in a boring, unimaginative nation with monotonous, dull people. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to experience the genuine culture outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous local, the character Costas, played with an bold facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the theater and on television, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental silver-years stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Director Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the film's name.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary period of glory.