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In the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a well-known star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, bright comedy with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.

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

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the alike path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with existence in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative place with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to experience the real thing outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous local, Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy older-age stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give 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 alluded to by the movie's title.

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