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During the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a recognisable star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a superb character for a older actress, tackling the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Film

It started from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely followed the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her 40s in a dull, uninspired nation with boring, predictable individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to live the real thing away from the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous native, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the theater and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist 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 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.