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In the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a recognisable star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic comedy with a superb role for a older actress, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much followed the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity country with boring, dull people. So when she gets the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to experience the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming resident, the character Costas, played with an striking mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the stage and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and cloying elderly entertainments 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 ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the film's name.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary time to shine.