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In the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She became a familiar star on each side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, bright story with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway midlife comedy.

She turned into the toast of London theater and the Broadway stage and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit film version. This very much followed the comparable transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, unimaginative place with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to live the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish native, the character Costas, played with an outrageous facial hair and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively career on the theater and on television, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs maid.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age stories about old people, which were beneath her talents, 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 the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.