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In the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, humorous, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a well-known celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster British TV show the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that viewers cherished, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, mischievous but endearing story paved the way for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, humorous, sunshine-y film with a excellent part for a older actress, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

The story began from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the star of the West End and Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the blockbuster cinematic rendition. This closely followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is weary with life in her forties in a dull, unimaginative place with boring, predictable folk. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the unexciting English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to experience the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate adventure with the roguish resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It received loud laughter in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines 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 stage and on TV, including appearances on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the class of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the 2011 movie 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 often chosen in patronizing and syrupy elderly stories about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (though a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

However, in cinema, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary period of glory.