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In the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a familiar figure on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, sunshine-y story with a superb character for a older actress, addressing the theme of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much followed the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her 40s in a boring, uninspired country with boring, dull people. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to live the real thing away from the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous native, the character Costas, played with an outrageous mustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the stage and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying silver-years films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the film's name.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous period of glory.