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During the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a familiar celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, funny, sunshine-y story with a superb role for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of London theater and Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful film version. This largely followed the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her 40s in a boring, lacking creativity country with boring, unimaginative folk. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture 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 dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the theater and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a author in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the film's name.

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