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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, funny, and appealingly charming female actor. She became a familiar star on each side of the ocean thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic story with a excellent part for a mature female lead, addressing the subject of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about demure youth.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

The story began from Collins performing the starring part of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the highly successful film version. This closely paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is bored with daily routine in her middle age in a boring, uninspired nation with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the dull English traveler she’s traveled with – continues once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture beyond the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the charming native, the character Costas, acted with an striking mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s thinking. It earned big laughs in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively career on the theater and on TV, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a British missionary and POW in Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

But she found herself often chosen in condescending and syrupy elderly stories about the aged, 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 French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Director Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.