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During the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a familiar celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a television couple that viewers cherished, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a superb part for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

This iconic role anticipated the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely followed the similar path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her middle age in a boring, unimaginative nation with boring, predictable people. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the boring English traveler she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s ended to encounter the real thing outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there seemed 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 passable located in Kolkata film, 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 filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller referenced by the movie's title.

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