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During the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a familiar celebrity on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice adventure set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent character for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the main character of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of the West End and Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely followed the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with daily routine in her 40s in a boring, uninspired nation with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s ended to experience the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she says to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata drama, the movie 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 the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying older-age stories about seniors, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films 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 the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the film's name.

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