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In the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a well-known celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, comical, bright comedy with a wonderful part for a mature female lead, broaching the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a dull, unimaginative place with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish local, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It received huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the theater and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs maid.

But she found herself often chosen in condescending and cloying silver-years films about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

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 dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the film's name.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary period of glory.