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During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a clever, funny, and appealingly charming female actor. She grew into a familiar star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive parlour maid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a relationship with the handsome driver Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing journey paved the way for future favorites like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, optimistic comedy with a superb character for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about modest young women.

This iconic role foreshadowed the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a an era in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an fantasy midlife comedy.

Collins became the celebrity of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly selected in the highly successful film version. This very much followed the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a dull, uninspired nation with monotonous, unimaginative individuals. So when she gets the chance at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she seizes it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to experience the genuine culture away from the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an outrageous moustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she remarks to viewers: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the stage and on television, including parts 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 the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent Calcutta-set film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy elderly films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories 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 actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (albeit a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant alluded to by the movie's title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable time to shine.