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In the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a familiar star on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic film with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about women's health and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the celebrity of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity place with boring, unimaginative people. So when she receives the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s over to live the authentic life beyond the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish local, the character Costas, acted with an striking mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and cloying elderly stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller referenced by the film's name.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary period of glory.