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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a familiar figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster 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 romance with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, bright film with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of the West End and Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely followed the similar path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is weary with life in her 40s in a dull, uninspired country with uninteresting, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to experience the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming local, the character Costas, acted with an striking facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the theater and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and syrupy older-age films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.