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In the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a well-known star on each side of the sea thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, bright story with a superb role for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

This iconic role prefigured the new debate about perimenopause and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She turned into the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a dull, uninspired country with monotonous, dull folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to live the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the mischievous resident, Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and cloying older-age films about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

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