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During the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, funny, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a recognisable figure on either side of the sea thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a dodgy past. Sarah had a romance with the handsome driver Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

Her Moment of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her career occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming story paved the way for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, humorous, optimistic film with a superb part for a older actress, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

This iconic role prefigured the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins performing the main character of a lifetime in playwright Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and surprisingly passionate everywoman heroine of an escapist middle-aged story.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously cast in the blockbuster film version. This very much followed the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her 40s in a boring, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, predictable individuals. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in Greece, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull UK tourist she’s gone with – continues once it’s ended to experience the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming local, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It received huge chuckles in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the theater and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a manner, to the servant-and-master world in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying older-age entertainments about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as care-home dramas 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 Brief Return in Humor

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

But in the movies, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary time to shine.