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During the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a well-known figure on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming journey opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, sunshine-y film with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the celebrity of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster film version. This closely paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative nation with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – stays on once it’s finished to live the authentic life outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the roguish native, the character Costas, acted with an bold facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

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

A Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the title.

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