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In the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a familiar figure on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, funny, bright comedy with a superb part for a older actress, addressing the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

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

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. 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

The film's protagonist is a practical wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative nation with monotonous, predictable individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s ended to live the authentic life beyond the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish resident, the character Costas, acted with an bold moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on the small screen, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a servant-level maid.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller alluded to by the title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary period of glory.