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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive performer. She developed into a recognisable figure on both sides of the sea thanks to the blockbuster English program Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that viewers cherished, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice adventure opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, humorous, optimistic story with a wonderful part for a older actress, tackling the topic of female sexuality that did not conform by usual male ideas about demure youth.

Her portrayal of Shirley foreshadowed the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She turned into the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the highly successful film version. This closely followed the comparable stage-to-screen journey of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with daily routine in her 40s in a tedious, unimaginative place with monotonous, unimaginative people. So when she gets the possibility at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting English traveler she’s gone with – stays on once it’s ended to live the authentic life away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy adventure with the charming local, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and accent by the performer Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he loves her skin lines and she comments to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on the small screen, including appearances on Doctor Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided world in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

But she found herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental older-age films about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic alluded to by the movie's title.

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