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During the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a familiar celebrity on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic comedy with a excellent character for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of women's desires that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the celebrity of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully cast in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the alike transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative place with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the real thing outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming native, Costas, played with an striking facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the theater and on television, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in condescending and cloying silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic referenced by the title.

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