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During the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a familiar celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y story with a wonderful role for a older actress, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with life in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative place with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the roguish native, Costas, portrayed with an striking moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and cloying older-age films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous period of glory.