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During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, humorous, and cherubically sexy performer. She grew into a familiar figure on both sides of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable parlour maid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, bright film with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, addressing the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins performing the main character of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of London theater and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a practical scouse housewife who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a boring, unimaginative country with monotonous, dull folk. So when she wins the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to experience the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, acted with an bold moustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It received huge chuckles in cinemas all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on TV, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the film industry where there appeared not to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She starred in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a sense, to the class-divided setting in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying older-age films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic alluded to by the title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous time to shine.