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During the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a well-known celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent character for a seasoned performer, addressing the subject of women's desires that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring 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 cast in the highly successful film version. This very much mirrored the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, uninspired nation with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to experience the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the roguish local, Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in director 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 came back, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and cloying silver-years entertainments about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.