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In the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She developed into a well-known figure on both sides of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic comedy with a excellent part for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the celebrity of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful film version. This largely mirrored the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with existence in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative place with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the charming resident, Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active career on the theater and on television, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs maid.

But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and syrupy elderly films about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.