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In the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that audiences adored, extending into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, bright comedy with a wonderful character for a older actress, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her forties in a tedious, lacking creativity country with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the chance at a no-cost trip in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to encounter the real thing away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the charming resident, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the theater and on TV, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there seemed not to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and cloying silver-years entertainments about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

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