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During the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a recognisable figure on either 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 housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, bright story with a excellent part for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with life in her 40s in a dull, uninspired place with boring, predictable folk. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to encounter the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous resident, Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

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

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic alluded to by the film's name.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.