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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins appeared as a smart, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a well-known celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that the public loved, extending into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

Yet the highlight of greatness came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing story set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic comedy with a wonderful character for a older actress, tackling the theme of women's desires that was not governed by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the new debate about women's health and females refusing to accept to invisibility.

From Stage to Film

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unexpectedly sensual ordinary woman lead of an getaway middle-aged story.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful movie adaptation. This closely followed the comparable path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

Her character Shirley is a down-to-earth scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her forties in a dull, lacking creativity nation with monotonous, predictable individuals. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the dull British holidaymaker she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to live the authentic life away from the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the roguish local, Costas, portrayed with an striking moustache and dialect by the performer Tom Conti.

Cheeky, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s thinking. It got loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he appreciates her body marks and she says to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a active work on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the class of Willy Russell who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta story, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs housekeeper.

But she found herself frequently selected in dismissive and cloying silver-years stories about old people, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen did give her a real comedy role (although a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary time to shine.