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During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She developed into a familiar celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success arrived on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic comedy with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins performing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an getaway middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This closely followed the alike transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with life in her 40s in a tedious, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish native, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in movie houses all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the stage and on television, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

But she found herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and syrupy older-age films about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

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

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable period of glory.