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During the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She became a well-known figure on each side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, bright film with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, tackling the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the alike transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity country with boring, predictable folk. So when she receives the opportunity at a no-cost trip in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to experience the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, played with an bold facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy silver-years stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (though a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller referenced by the movie's title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous period of glory.