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In the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a well-known celebrity on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, sunshine-y story with a superb character for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the emerging discussion about perimenopause and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy midlife comedy.

Collins became the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This closely followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her middle age in a tedious, unimaginative nation with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to experience the authentic life away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming resident, the character Costas, played with an outrageous moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It got loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the theater and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy older-age entertainments about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, 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 Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous time to shine.