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In the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She developed into a well-known figure on both sides of the sea thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent part for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

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

Starting in Theater to Screen

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful film version. This very much paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her 40s in a dull, uninspired nation with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to experience the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish native, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental elderly films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Director Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the film's name.

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