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During the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a well-known star on both sides of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that audiences adored, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice journey set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y film with a superb role for a older actress, addressing the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

From Stage to Film

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with life in her middle age in a dull, uninspired country with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to encounter the real thing away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the roguish resident, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous mustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the theater and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age stories about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (though a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.