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During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, witty, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a familiar star on either side of the sea 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 dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic film with a superb role for a older actress, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely mirrored the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with existence in her middle age in a boring, unimaginative nation with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to experience the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the roguish native, the character Costas, acted with an striking mustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on the small screen, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Director Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.