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In the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She became a recognisable figure on either side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. It was a television couple that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success came on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, bright story with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, addressing the topic of women's desires that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Screen

The story began from Collins taking on the main character of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an escapist middle-aged story.

Collins became the celebrity of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This very much followed the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with existence in her 40s in a boring, lacking creativity country with monotonous, dull individuals. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s finished to live the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a active work on the theater and on the small screen, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and starred as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a sense, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level maid.

But she found herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy silver-years films about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic referenced by the title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.