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During the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a recognisable figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y film with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of London theater and Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is weary with life in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative nation with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s finished to live the genuine culture outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish local, Costas, played with an striking mustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level maid.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying older-age entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Director Woody Allen offered 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 dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.