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In the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a familiar figure on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y film with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Screen

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of London theater and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with life in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative country with boring, dull people. So when she receives the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to live the authentic life away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish local, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she says to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying older-age entertainments about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

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