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In the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a familiar star on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, humorous, bright film with a superb part for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her 40s in a boring, lacking creativity country with monotonous, dull people. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to experience the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous native, Costas, played with an bold mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the theater and on the small screen, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

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

A Brief Return in Humor

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic referenced by the movie's title.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary time to shine.