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In the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y story with a wonderful character for a older actress, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then successfully cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely followed the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, dull people. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull British holidaymaker she’s gone with – continues once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming local, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and overly sentimental silver-years films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (though a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic hinted at by the title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary time to shine.