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During the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a well-known celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y story with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the new debate about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster film version. This closely mirrored the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with life in her forties in a tedious, uninspired place with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to experience the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, played with an bold mustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy elderly films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

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