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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, witty, and youthfully attractive female actor. She grew into a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

Her role was the character Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a superb character for a mature female lead, tackling the topic of women's desires that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

This iconic role anticipated the new debate about midlife changes and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Cinema

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an getaway midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Her character Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her forties in a boring, lacking creativity place with boring, dull individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull British holidaymaker she’s gone with – continues once it’s over to encounter the real thing outside the resort area, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish local, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant professional life on the theater and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, 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 condescending and cloying elderly stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen provided her a real comedy role (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary time to shine.