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During the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a familiar figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, bright story with a excellent character for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

This iconic role anticipated the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

Collins became the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with life in her middle age in a dull, uninspired country with boring, predictable people. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to encounter the real thing beyond the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous native, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy older-age entertainments about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.