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In the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a well-known figure on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the good-looking driver Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that audiences adored, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, optimistic comedy with a excellent part for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the growing conversation about women's health and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the celebrity of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit film version. This very much mirrored the similar path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity place with monotonous, unimaginative people. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to encounter the real thing away from the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous resident, Costas, portrayed with an bold mustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on TV, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the class of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata film, 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 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 servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying elderly stories about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

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