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During the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, bright film with a superb part for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

This iconic role anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Film

It originated from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This largely followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her 40s in a dull, uninspired nation with monotonous, predictable individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to live the genuine culture outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the charming resident, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on television, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported 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 appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided environment in which she played a servant-level maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying elderly stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the film's name.

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