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During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, humorous, and youthfully attractive actress. She grew into a recognisable star on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice journey opened the door for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, funny, optimistic comedy with a excellent character for a mature female lead, broaching the theme of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the celebrity of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely paralleled the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her forties in a tedious, uninspired nation with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture outside the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the mischievous native, the character Costas, acted with an striking moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively career on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable located in Kolkata drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and cloying elderly stories about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, 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 Small Comeback in Comedy

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the title.

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