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In the 1970s, this gifted performer appeared as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a recognisable star on each side of the sea thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, bright comedy with a superb part for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the smash-hit film version. This largely followed the similar stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her forties in a tedious, uninspired nation with boring, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the charming native, the character Costas, played with an striking facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It got huge chuckles in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

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

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying elderly entertainments about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the film's name.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable time to shine.