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During the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She developed into a recognisable celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, funny, bright story with a superb role for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

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

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an escapist midlife comedy.

Collins became the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the highly successful film version. This largely followed the alike path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her forties in a boring, unimaginative country with boring, dull individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s finished to experience the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming local, Costas, acted with an bold mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It received big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a downstairs maid.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy silver-years entertainments about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.

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