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In the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a familiar figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, funny, sunshine-y comedy with a superb role for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Film

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the toast of London theater and Broadway and was then successfully cast in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much followed the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with existence in her forties in a boring, lacking creativity nation with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s gone with – stays on once it’s finished to experience the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous native, the character Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain 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?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy older-age entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film 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, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.