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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a well-known celebrity on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her success came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y film with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, tackling the subject of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the highly successful film version. This closely followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her forties in a boring, unimaginative place with boring, dull folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish resident, Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and accent by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on TV, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the cinema where there appeared not to be a writer in the league of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying older-age entertainments about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller alluded to by the film's name.

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