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During the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a familiar figure on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, sunshine-y story with a wonderful character for a older actress, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Film

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful film version. This very much mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with boring, predictable folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to encounter the real thing away from the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish native, Costas, played with an striking facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and syrupy elderly films about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller referenced by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable period of glory.