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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a familiar celebrity on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a connection with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, extending into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice story set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, comical, sunshine-y comedy with a superb character for a older actress, broaching the topic of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She was hailed as the toast of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This closely mirrored the alike path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

The film's protagonist is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is weary with life in her 40s in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with monotonous, dull people. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the dull British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to live the real thing away from the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, played with an bold facial hair and dialect by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s feeling. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she says to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the theater and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the class-divided environment in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying silver-years films about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

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

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.