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During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a familiar celebrity on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, sunshine-y film with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London theater and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity place with boring, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in Greece, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish resident, the character Costas, played with an outrageous mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the theater and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a author in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and cloying silver-years films about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Director Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the title.

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