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During the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, witty, and appealingly charming performer. She developed into a well-known celebrity on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, comical, bright film with a wonderful part for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully cast in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her forties in a dull, uninspired country with monotonous, dull folk. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s ended to live the real thing away from the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the roguish local, the character Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying silver-years entertainments about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller referenced by the title.

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