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In the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a recognisable star on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y film with a superb role for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the main character of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely followed the alike path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a dull, uninspired place with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to live the real thing away from the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming resident, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the film's name.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous time to shine.