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During the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a recognisable figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This largely paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her forties in a boring, unimaginative place with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the dull British holidaymaker she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s ended to encounter the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming native, Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s passable located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy silver-years entertainments 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 poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (albeit a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous period of glory.