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During the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a recognisable star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y story with a superb character for a older actress, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative nation with boring, predictable people. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to live the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming local, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the theater and on the small screen, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying elderly films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the title.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.