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In the 70s, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a familiar celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, optimistic story with a wonderful character for a older actress, broaching the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Film

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much mirrored the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a realistic wife from Liverpool who is bored with existence in her forties in a boring, uninspired place with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to encounter the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish resident, the character Costas, acted with an striking moustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s thinking. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the theater and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and syrupy elderly films about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (albeit a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

Yet on film, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary period of glory.