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During the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a well-known star on both sides of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, comical, optimistic film with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

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

Originating on Stage to Screen

It started from Collins playing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit film version. This closely mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her middle age in a dull, uninspired place with boring, dull folk. So when she receives the chance at a no-cost trip in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to live the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the mischievous native, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the stage and on TV, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and syrupy older-age stories about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller hinted at by the film's name.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.