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In the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic film with a wonderful character for a older actress, broaching the topic of women's desires that was not limited by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins playing the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, dull people. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming native, Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the theater and on TV, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying older-age entertainments about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic hinted at by the film's name.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.