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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a familiar figure on both sides of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y film with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Film

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the toast of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative place with uninteresting, dull people. So when she receives the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to live the genuine culture outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming native, the character Costas, played with an striking moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active work on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental older-age films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary period of glory.