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During the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a familiar figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y story with a wonderful part for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of women's desires that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the celebrity of the West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful film version. This largely paralleled the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity nation with boring, dull people. So when she gets the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to encounter the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish native, the character Costas, acted with an striking moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s thinking. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the theater and on TV, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and cloying silver-years stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.