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During the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a familiar celebrity on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, humorous, optimistic story with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of women's desires that was not limited by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It started from Collins performing the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster film version. This very much paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her forties in a tedious, uninspired nation with boring, dull folk. So when she receives the chance at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming local, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy elderly entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.