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In the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a recognisable star on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, bright story with a excellent character for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the celebrity of the West End and Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is weary with life in her 40s in a tedious, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to live the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish resident, the character Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and cloying elderly 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 French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller alluded to by the film's name.

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