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In the seventies, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a well-known star on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, sunshine-y story with a wonderful part for a older actress, tackling the topic of women's desires that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with existence in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative place with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to experience the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming local, Costas, acted with an bold facial hair and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy older-age films about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

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 shady fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.