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During the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a familiar star on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, funny, bright comedy with a superb part for a older actress, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Film

It started from Collins performing the main character of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then successfully cast in the blockbuster film version. This largely paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative country with monotonous, dull folk. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s finished to live the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the charming native, Costas, played with an bold moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

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

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs maid.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and syrupy elderly films 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 ropey located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a tremendous time to shine.