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In the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She became a well-known celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y story with a wonderful role for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of the West End and Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the highly successful film version. This closely paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a dull, uninspired country with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the chance at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – continues once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the charming resident, Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the stage and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying silver-years stories about seniors, 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 French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.