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In the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a well-known star on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Her character had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, continuing into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, humorous, bright story with a wonderful part for a seasoned performer, broaching the topic of female sexuality that was not governed by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about perimenopause and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

It started from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London theater and Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely mirrored the similar stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is weary with existence in her middle age in a dull, unimaginative nation with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she gets the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with eagerness and – to the surprise of the unexciting English traveler she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture beyond the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish local, Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively work on the theater and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age films about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable time to shine.