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During the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a familiar star on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her success arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, optimistic comedy with a excellent part for a mature female lead, addressing the topic of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a an era in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of the West End and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster film version. This largely followed the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is weary with life in her 40s in a boring, lacking creativity country with boring, unimaginative people. So when she receives the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to encounter the authentic life outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the roguish native, Costas, portrayed with an striking mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively career on the theater and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata film, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy older-age entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (though a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the film's name.

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