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During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a clever, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a familiar star on each side of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic comedy with a superb character for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her forties in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with boring, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the theater and on TV, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs maid.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying elderly stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic hinted at by the movie's title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.