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During the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a well-known figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent part for a mature female lead, broaching the topic of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

She turned into the star of London theater and Broadway and was then successfully cast in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is tired with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired place with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to experience the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous native, Costas, played with an bold facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema 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 set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in director 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 class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying older-age films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic hinted at by the movie's title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.