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During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a well-known star on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, bright film with a superb 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 anticipated the new debate about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with life in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, predictable people. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – continues once it’s finished to experience the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming native, Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the theater and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years films 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 located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Director Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller hinted at by the title.

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