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In the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent part for a older actress, addressing the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Film

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

She turned into the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit film version. This largely mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired country with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the unexciting English traveler she’s gone with – continues once it’s ended to encounter the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the mischievous local, the character Costas, played with an bold facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a author in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental elderly films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary period of glory.