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During the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a familiar celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, comical, bright story with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of women's desires that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful film version. This largely mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired country with monotonous, predictable individuals. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to experience the authentic life beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the roguish native, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy older-age stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Director Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.