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During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, witty, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a well-known figure on both sides of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, humorous, sunshine-y film with a wonderful character for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

This iconic role prefigured the growing conversation about midlife changes and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Screen

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

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the smash-hit film version. This very much paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative nation with uninteresting, dull folk. So when she gets the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in Greece, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s finished to live the genuine culture away from the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the mischievous local, Costas, portrayed with an bold facial hair and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s thinking. It received loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he appreciates 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 active professional life on the theater and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the film industry where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself frequently selected in patronizing and cloying elderly films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey set in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Director Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the movie's title.

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