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During the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming female actor. She grew into a recognisable figure on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that audiences adored, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright film with a wonderful role for a older actress, broaching the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Film

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster film version. This closely paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her forties in a tedious, lacking creativity place with monotonous, unimaginative people. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull British holidaymaker she’s gone with – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming native, Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a servant-level maid.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and cloying silver-years entertainments about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.