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In the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a recognisable star on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the good-looking driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic comedy with a wonderful part for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of London theater and Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely mirrored the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity nation with boring, unimaginative people. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming local, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s feeling. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

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

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie 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 frequently selected in dismissive and cloying silver-years entertainments about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Director Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the title.

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