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In the seventies, this gifted performer rose as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a well-known celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic film with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, addressing the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely mirrored the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity place with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s gone with – continues once it’s ended to experience the authentic life away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish native, Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s feeling. It received huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the theater and on television, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy elderly entertainments about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary time to shine.