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In the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a well-known figure on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, funny, bright comedy with a excellent character for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of women's desires that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

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

Starting in Theater to Screen

It started from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of London theater and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely followed the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative place with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – remains once it’s ended to experience the real thing away from the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous local, Costas, played with an striking mustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively work on the theater and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and syrupy silver-years stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (though a minor role) in his the film 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, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable period of glory.