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In the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, funny, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a recognisable figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic story with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, tackling the theme of women's desires that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway middle-aged story.

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

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her forties in a boring, uninspired country with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she wins the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture beyond the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous local, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there appeared not to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead 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 film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy elderly entertainments about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas 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 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 dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.