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In the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a well-known figure on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, extending into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y story with a superb character for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

The story began 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 unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with life in her forties in a dull, uninspired nation with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to experience the genuine culture outside the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming local, Costas, portrayed with an striking moustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the stage and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy older-age entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film 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 true funny character (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

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