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In the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a recognisable star on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent part for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with existence in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative country with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish native, the character Costas, acted with an striking mustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the stage and on television, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying elderly films 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 ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though 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 extraordinary time to shine.