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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She grew into a recognisable celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, optimistic film with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of women's desires that did not conform by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the highly successful film version. This largely paralleled the alike path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is tired with daily routine in her 40s in a dull, uninspired place with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish resident, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

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

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively work on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying older-age films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (though a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic referenced by the title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary time to shine.