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In the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a familiar star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic comedy with a superb part for a older actress, tackling the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This largely followed the alike path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a boring, uninspired nation with boring, dull individuals. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to experience the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming native, Costas, acted with an striking mustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a servant-level maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying older-age entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his 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 remarkable moment in the sun.