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During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a recognisable star on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y film with a excellent role for a older actress, broaching the theme of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the smash-hit film version. This very much mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her 40s in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to encounter the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous native, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the stage and on TV, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy older-age entertainments about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.