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During the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a recognisable star on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, funny, bright story with a excellent character for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about perimenopause and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful film version. This very much paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative nation with monotonous, predictable individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish native, Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Director Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary period of glory.