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During the seventies, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She became a familiar celebrity on both sides of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the attractive driver Thomas the chauffeur, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of her career came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, sunshine-y film with a wonderful role for a older actress, tackling the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine anticipated the emerging discussion about women's health and ladies who decline to invisibility.

From Stage to Cinema

The story began from Collins performing the lead role of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This largely followed the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her 40s in a dull, unimaginative place with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she gets the opportunity at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture outside the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous native, the character Costas, acted with an bold mustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he loves her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a writer in the class of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the class-divided world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age stories about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Director Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (albeit a small one) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.