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In the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She became a familiar celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She turned into the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a boring, unimaginative nation with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to live the genuine culture outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming local, the character Costas, played with an striking moustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It received loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on TV, including parts 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 genuine lead part.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s decent set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.