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In the 70s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming female actor. She grew into a well-known celebrity on each side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a shady background. Her character had a relationship with the attractive driver Thomas, played by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. It was a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her career arrived on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming adventure paved the way for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y story with a superb character for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of women's desires that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.

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

Starting in Theater to Screen

The story began from Collins playing the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an fantasy middle-aged story.

Collins became the star of London theater and Broadway and was then victoriously cast in the smash-hit film version. This very much mirrored the alike stage-to-screen journey of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is tired with life in her forties in a boring, unimaginative country with boring, dull individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s ended to live the authentic life outside the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the mischievous native, Costas, acted with an outrageous mustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Sassy, open Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s pondering. It got huge chuckles in cinemas all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the class-divided environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in condescending and overly sentimental older-age films about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Woody Allen did give her a genuine humorous part (although a small one) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic hinted at by the film's name.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous moment in the sun.