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During the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a recognisable celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice adventure opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic comedy with a wonderful role for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

This iconic role anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her forties in a boring, uninspired place with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she receives the opportunity at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to encounter the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming native, the character Costas, played with an striking moustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the theater and on the small screen, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy older-age entertainments about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the film's name.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.