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During the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a clever, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a well-known star on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic film with a wonderful part for a older actress, addressing the theme of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely followed the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with life in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s finished to encounter the genuine culture outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming native, Costas, portrayed with an bold mustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the theater and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying silver-years films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Director Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller referenced by the movie's title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary time to shine.