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During the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She became a well-known figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, sunshine-y story with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative place with boring, predictable people. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to live the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the roguish native, Costas, played with an striking moustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a author in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy older-age entertainments about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (though a minor role) 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 tremendous period of glory.