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In the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, bright comedy with a superb part for a seasoned performer, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about perimenopause and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her middle age in a dull, uninspired nation with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming local, the character Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying elderly entertainments about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous time to shine.