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In the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a recognisable star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, bright comedy with a superb part for a seasoned performer, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely followed the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with life in her 40s in a boring, lacking creativity country with boring, predictable folk. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the dull British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to experience the real thing away from the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the charming local, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a author in the league of the playwright 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 starred as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying older-age stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (though a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous time to shine.