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In the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a well-known celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, bright film with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role prefigured the new debate about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the main character of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully cast in the blockbuster film version. This largely paralleled the alike transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity country with boring, predictable individuals. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to live the genuine culture outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the charming resident, Costas, played with an striking mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s feeling. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and cloying elderly entertainments about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller hinted at by the title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.