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In the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy female actor. She grew into a well-known star on each side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, sunshine-y film with a excellent part for a mature female lead, broaching the topic of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the growing conversation about women's health and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster film version. This largely followed the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with existence in her forties in a tedious, uninspired country with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to live the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the roguish resident, the character Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age stories about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories 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 Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.