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During the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a well-known star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, bright comedy with a superb part for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

The story began from Collins performing the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is weary with existence in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative nation with boring, predictable folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s ended to experience the real thing outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the charming resident, Costas, acted with an bold moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy elderly films about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic hinted at by the film's name.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.