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In the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a well-known star on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y film with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of women's desires that did not conform by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her forties in a dull, unimaginative country with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she wins the chance at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – remains once it’s ended to live the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous native, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and syrupy elderly stories about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic referenced by the film's name.

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