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In the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a well-known celebrity on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness occurred on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, bright comedy with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Film

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

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

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with life in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative place with uninteresting, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s over to encounter the real thing outside the tourist compound, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the mischievous native, Costas, played with an striking facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on television, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a sense, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental silver-years stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (though a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy fortune teller referenced by the film's name.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.