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In the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She developed into a well-known star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic film with a excellent character for a older actress, addressing the subject of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully cast in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely followed the alike path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative place with uninteresting, dull people. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to experience the real thing outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming native, Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

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

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s adequate Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy elderly films about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with 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 dodgy clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.