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During the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a well-known star on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, bright story with a superb character for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her forties in a dull, uninspired country with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to experience the genuine culture beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the charming native, Costas, acted with an striking moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It received big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental older-age entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Director Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller referenced by the title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary period of glory.