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During the seventies, Pauline Collins emerged as a intelligent, funny, and youthfully attractive female actor. She developed into a well-known celebrity on either side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a dodgy past. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas, played by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. It was a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, which carried on into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of greatness came on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, naughty-but-nice adventure paved the way for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, comical, bright film with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of women's desires that was not limited by usual male ideas about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the new debate about women's health and ladies who decline to being overlooked.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy midlife comedy.

She turned into the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This very much followed the alike stage-to-screen journey of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her forties in a dull, unimaginative place with uninteresting, dull individuals. So when she wins the chance at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she seizes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring English traveler she’s gone with – remains once it’s over to live the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the charming local, the character Costas, portrayed with an bold moustache and speech by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to share with us what she’s feeling. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her stretch marks and she comments to us: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active career on the theater and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary period of glory.