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In the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a well-known celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent part for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Film

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit film version. This very much paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to experience the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish local, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and syrupy older-age stories about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary period of glory.