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During the seventies, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a recognisable figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing story paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic story with a wonderful role for a older actress, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Film

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the smash-hit film version. This closely followed the alike transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her middle age in a tedious, uninspired nation with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to live the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the charming native, Costas, acted with an striking moustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the stage and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy silver-years entertainments about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the movie's title.

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