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During the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming performer. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic comedy with a wonderful role for a older actress, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

This iconic role anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful film version. This very much mirrored the alike path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a tedious, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming local, Costas, played with an striking facial hair and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and syrupy older-age stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant referenced by the title.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.