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In the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a familiar celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic comedy with a superb character for a older actress, broaching the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Film

The story began from Collins playing the main character of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit film version. This largely mirrored the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – remains once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish local, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy older-age stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the title.

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