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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins rose as a clever, funny, and cherubically sexy performer. She developed into a recognisable figure on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

Her role was the character Sarah, a bold but fragile housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the attractive driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a TV marriage that audiences adored, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career arrived on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey opened the door for subsequent successes like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, humorous, sunshine-y comedy with a wonderful role for a older actress, tackling the subject of female sexuality that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

Originating on Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins playing the lead role of a lifetime in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then successfully chosen in the blockbuster film version. This very much paralleled the alike path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, 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 boring, lacking creativity nation with monotonous, predictable folk. So when she receives the opportunity at a complimentary vacation in the Greek islands, she seizes it with both hands and – to the surprise of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s gone with – remains once it’s ended to encounter the genuine culture away from the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the roguish local, the character Costas, played with an bold mustache and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding the heroine is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It got big laughs in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Following the film, the actress continued to have a lively work on the stage and on TV, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there didn’t seem to be a author in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta film, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and starred as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a servant-level maid.

But she found herself often chosen in condescending and syrupy older-age stories about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable psychic hinted at by the film's name.

But in the movies, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.