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During the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a well-known celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful part for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This very much followed the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with life in her 40s in a boring, lacking creativity country with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on TV, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in condescending and cloying silver-years entertainments about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic referenced by the film's name.

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