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During the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a well-known celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic comedy with a superb character for a older actress, broaching the topic of feminine sensuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Film

It started from Collins playing the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit film version. This very much followed the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity nation with monotonous, dull folk. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s finished to experience the genuine culture outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming local, the character Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the stage and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there seemed not to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental elderly stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable period of glory.