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During the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a recognisable figure on each side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, bright story with a excellent character for a older actress, addressing the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her forties in a boring, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, predictable people. So when she gets the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to live the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish resident, Costas, portrayed with an striking moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy silver-years films about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic hinted at by the film's name.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.