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In the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a familiar figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic story with a excellent part for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative place with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s ended to encounter the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming resident, the character Costas, played with an striking mustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in condescending and cloying elderly entertainments about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.