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In the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a recognisable figure on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic comedy with a excellent character for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of women's desires that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This closely followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired nation with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the unexciting English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to encounter the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous resident, Costas, played with an striking mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying silver-years films about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller alluded to by the film's name.

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