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During the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, witty, and appealingly charming performer. She developed into a familiar star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice adventure opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, bright comedy with a wonderful part for a older actress, tackling the subject of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit film version. This largely followed the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity place with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to live the real thing away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming native, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on television, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy elderly films about old people, 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 poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the film's name.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable period of glory.