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In the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a well-known figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, sunshine-y story with a superb role for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of women's desires that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Film

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

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit film version. This largely paralleled the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity place with boring, dull folk. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to live the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming native, Costas, acted with an striking mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the class of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

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

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy silver-years films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the film's name.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary time to shine.