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In the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a recognisable figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, humorous, sunshine-y film with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the new debate about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a practical wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative nation with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to live the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous local, the character Costas, acted with an striking mustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying older-age entertainments about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary time to shine.