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In the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a familiar star on each side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y story with a superb role for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Film

It started from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much followed the alike transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her forties in a boring, uninspired nation with boring, unimaginative people. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to live the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying silver-years stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller alluded to by the film's name.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary period of glory.