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During the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a well-known figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, funny, sunshine-y film with a superb role for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much followed the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her 40s in a dull, lacking creativity nation with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming native, Costas, acted with an striking mustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s feeling. It received huge chuckles in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs maid.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying older-age films about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Director Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.