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In the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a familiar figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career arrived on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, bright film with a superb role for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Screen

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the alike path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative nation with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s finished to experience the real thing outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous native, Costas, portrayed with an striking moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying older-age entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his 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, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.