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In the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a well-known star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright comedy with a superb character for a seasoned performer, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This largely followed the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative place with uninteresting, dull people. So when she gets the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s finished to live the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the charming native, the character Costas, acted with an bold facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the movie's title.

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