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During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She became a recognisable celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, humorous, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent role for a mature female lead, addressing the theme of feminine sensuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about demure youth.

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

From Stage to Screen

The story began from Collins performing the main character of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the star of London theater and Broadway and was then triumphantly cast in the highly successful film version. This largely paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with life in her middle age in a boring, lacking creativity country with uninteresting, unimaginative people. So when she receives the chance at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the unexciting UK tourist she’s traveled with – continues once it’s over to live the authentic life beyond the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the roguish local, the character Costas, played with an bold mustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always addressing the audience to inform us what she’s pondering. It received huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she comments to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on television, including parts on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a author in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a sense, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental older-age stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as nursing home stories like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Filmmaker Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady fortune teller hinted at by the title.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable period of glory.