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In the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, funny, and appealingly charming female actor. She grew into a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright comedy with a excellent part for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster film version. This largely followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, dull people. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to experience the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, played with an outrageous mustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and cloying elderly stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

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 dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.