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In the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a well-known star on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, bright story with a excellent character for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the highly successful film version. This very much paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired place with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to experience the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the charming local, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments 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 theater and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying elderly stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant referenced by the title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.