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During the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a well-known figure on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, bright comedy with a superb character for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the smash-hit film version. This closely followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative place with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish local, Costas, acted with an bold facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on television, 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 Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs maid.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller alluded to by the title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary period of glory.