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During the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a well-known figure on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, bright film with a excellent role for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the highly successful film version. This very much paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative nation with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to live the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy elderly films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant referenced by the title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.