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In the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a familiar star on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a television couple that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright comedy with a excellent role for a older actress, tackling the theme of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster film version. This largely paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is weary with life in her middle age in a dull, uninspired nation with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish native, Costas, played with an outrageous mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying older-age entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

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 shady psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.