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In the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She developed into a well-known star on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, bright comedy with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about perimenopause and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely followed the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative country with monotonous, dull people. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to live the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming native, Costas, played with an bold facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned huge chuckles in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy older-age entertainments about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

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

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary time to shine.