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In the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a well-known celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, bright story with a superb character for a seasoned performer, addressing the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

The story began from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London theater and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her 40s in a boring, uninspired country with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to encounter the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming resident, Costas, played with an striking moustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying silver-years entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.