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During the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a recognisable star on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, sunshine-y film with a superb part for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the toast of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful film version. This largely paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with life in her forties in a tedious, uninspired place with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to live the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous native, the character Costas, played with an outrageous mustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there appeared not to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a servant-level maid.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying older-age stories 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 poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the title.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable period of glory.