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During the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a familiar figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, bright comedy with a superb role for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit film version. This closely paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with existence in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative place with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s ended to live the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the roguish local, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s feeling. It earned big laughs in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.