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In the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness came on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice story opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a superb character for a older actress, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater 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 longing and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully cast in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This closely followed the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her forties in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the dull British holidaymaker she’s gone with – continues once it’s over to experience the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish resident, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on TV, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying elderly stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.