She epitomized the essence of a midlife revelation, embodying the perimenopausal wife and mother who boldly left her spouse for an adventurous romance with a Greek bar owner named Costas.

Shirley Valentine, the beloved romantic comedy of the 1980s, catapulted Pauline Collins to international fame. Already cherished by British television audiences, Collins became a household name through this role.

Sadly, Collins has passed away at the age of 85 following a prolonged battle with Parkinson’s disease. She became an icon for women everywhere who yearned to reclaim and transform their lives while they still had the opportunity.

In a memorable scene, Shirley’s disgruntled husband, portrayed by Bernard Hill, declared his intention to fly to Greece and bring his wife back home. Shirley confidently responded, “The woman he’s coming to fetch doesn’t exist any more. I used to be the mother, the wife. Now I am Shirley Valentine again.”

Her on-screen lover, played by Tom Conti, was revealed to be a habitual charmer, selecting a new romantic interest from each arriving flight. Nevertheless, Shirley Valentine was unfazed, endearing herself even more to audiences worldwide.

Even though she had only made one previous film, a quarter of a century earlier, Pauline was the natural choice for the role – though Cher was also considered (‘Well, she would have been different, wouldn’t she?’ quipped Pauline).

Collins played the character in Liverpool playwright Willy Russell’s one-woman stage production, both on the West End and on Broadway, scooping the Olivier award in Britain and a Tony in the US, for Best Actress.

The film earned her an Oscar nomination in the same category, a then unprecedented triple achievement. She was 49: ‘There is hope for the wrinklies yet!’ she hooted.

Shirley Valentine, the romantic comedy smash hit of the 1980s, made a global star of Pauline Collins, an actress already much loved by British television viewers

Pauline Collins in 1972 series Upstairs Downstairs

UK television audiences, of course, already adored Pauline Collins, taking her to their hearts almost 20 years earlier as the cheeky parlour maid Sarah in ITV’s Upstairs, Downstairs – especially because in real life she was married to John Alderton, who played her onscreen husband, the chauffeur Thomas.

The couple starred in a spin-off, Thomas And Sarah, and a series of PG Wodehouse adaptations, as well as the sitcom No Honestly and a comedy-drama, Forever Green.

Working with her husband, she said, was easy – as long as they left the job at the studio or the stage door. ‘You go home and put the kettle on and make the food and forget about all that. We’re really rather boring actually. There’s nothing terrible going on in the woodshed.’ John stayed at home and looked after their three children when she was on Broadway. ‘He’s a good nappy changer,’ she said.

But even as Shirley Valentine was making her an international star, Pauline’s family life was rocked by the reappearance of her oldest child – a daughter she gave up for adoption at just six weeks old.

The young woman, named Louise Baker, was 24 when she applied for her birth certificate and saw her mother recorded as ‘Pauline Collins, actress’. At first, the name meant nothing to her, until a friend said: ‘You know, she’s the one on TV, the one who’s married to John Alderton.’

John had long known Pauline’s secret, but their own three children, Nicholas, Kate and Richard, did not. The reunion came as an emotional upheaval, but Pauline was overjoyed.

‘Every day of my life, I’ve sent a thought message to Louise to let her know I still loved her and that I did what I did for good reasons,’ she said.

She had become pregnant at 23 by a fellow actor, Tony Rohr, when they were touring Ireland with the Killarney Repertory Theatre, in 1964.

‘We fell in love,’ she said. ‘Tony was the first person I’d ever made love to. And with all the innocence and arrogance of youth, I decided not to tell anybody.’

Collins, who has died aged 85 after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease, became the heroine of every woman who ever decided to seize back her life and turn it upside down while she still had the chance

But even as Shirley Valentine was making her an international star, Pauline’s family life was rocked by the reappearance of her oldest child – a daughter she gave up for adoption at just six weeks old

Pauline Collins appears with her husband John Alderton at the premiere of “Quartet” during the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto on Sept. 9, 2012

Her reticence was compounded by the fact that both her parents were teachers in Catholic schools.

Born in Exmouth, Pauline grew up in Wallasey and had trained as a teacher herself, because it was the only way she could get a student grant from Liverpool council while she was training to be an actress.

Tony wanted to keep the baby, though they already knew marriage wouldn’t work for them, especially on their subsistence wages of £8 10 shillings (or £8.50) a week. ‘I decided to have the baby adopted,’ Pauline said. ‘It’s very hard to imagine now that there was such a stigma about being brought up illegitimate.’

After nursing the baby for six weeks at a mother-and-baby home run by nuns, Pauline had to hand her to an adoption agency.

‘It was the most astonishing and awful moment of my life,’ she recalled. ‘I made this awful sob.

‘I remember her turning round and looking at me. I thought, “This child knows.” It’s like having a piece of your heart torn out.’

For the next 24 years, she wrote letters to Louise that she never sent, because she didn’t know where her daughter was.

In fact, she was growing up a few streets away from where Tony, by then married with his own family, was living.

Not only did Pauline later forge a close bond with Louise but she became friendly with her adoptive mother. When they first met, Mrs Baker opened a box to reveal the knitted yellow baby suit that baby Louise was wearing when Pauline last saw her.

Four years later, she published a book, telling the whole story. It came with a twist: by 1992, Louise was married to an Egyptian man. The little girl who was born in a Catholic nursing home in Ireland was now a Muslim convert.

For Pauline, writing was a passion, especially poetry, and she read voraciously, too: Goethe and Jung were among her favourites. ‘I think I should use other parts of my brain, not just to re-create as an actor, but to create, to originate something.’

Accepting life as it came, she treated acting the same way. ‘I’m a terrible fatalist. I always feel that if you’re meant to do something, you will. I’m not a person who claws their way up in the old-fashioned style for parts.’

Pauline Collins on the set of TV series ‘The Black Tower,’ London, England, September 10, 1985

Pauline Collins attends the World Premiere of ‘The Time Of Their Lives’ at the Curzon Mayfair on March 8, 2017 in London, United Kingdom

This was compounded by her insistence that she wasn’t ‘a dolly bird with legs up to my ears. I have a round face and that’s why I ended up playing comedy.

‘I mean, it would be wonderful to play the odd murderess. But people don’t tend to take me seriously.’

She refused to take herself seriously, too. One of her favourite stories was of playing Shirley Valentine in New York, where at first she kept her broad Scouse accent. A heckler forced her to adopt a more transatlantic twang. After delivering the scripted line, ‘He can’t understand a bleeding word I’m saying,’ a Bronx voice in the auditorium shouted out, ‘Neither can I.’

Shirley Valentine proved the pinnacle of her career. Despite starring in TV dramas such as BBC1’s The Ambassador at the end of the 1990s and playing

Mrs Gamp in the bizarre 19th-century soap opera Dickensian, she took the lead in no more major movies.

Instead, she enjoyed a feast of cameo roles, in everything from Marple to Doctor Who.

‘You get what you are meant to get,’ she said. ‘I am not like Shirley Valentine. I prefer my life going forward. I loved my youth but I think I like now better.’