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In the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She became a recognisable figure on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic comedy with a superb part for a seasoned performer, addressing the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her forties in a dull, uninspired country with boring, predictable individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to live the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the theater and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs maid.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy elderly films about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.