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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a well-known figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, bright story with a excellent part for a older actress, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It started from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much followed the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, unimaginative place with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she receives the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to encounter the authentic life away from the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming local, Costas, portrayed with an bold facial hair and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned huge chuckles in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying silver-years stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (though a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic hinted at by the movie's title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous time to shine.