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During the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a familiar figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic comedy with a superb character for a older actress, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much followed the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative country with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to encounter the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, acted with an bold moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the theater and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy silver-years stories 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 subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Director Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (although a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.

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