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During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a recognisable figure on both sides of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a television couple that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic film with a wonderful character for a older actress, broaching the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Film

The story began from Collins playing the main character of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the blockbuster film version. This very much mirrored the comparable path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to live the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous native, Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on the small screen, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic referenced by the title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a remarkable period of glory.