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In the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a familiar figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic film with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of women's desires that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely followed the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her middle age in a dull, uninspired country with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she receives the chance at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to live the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the theater and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there seemed not to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 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 cloying elderly entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the title.

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