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During the seventies, Pauline Collins appeared as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a recognisable star on either side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Her character had a romance with the attractive chauffeur Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that viewers cherished, continuing into follow-up programs like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a buoyant, comical, bright story with a superb role for a mature female lead, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about youthful innocence.

This iconic role prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

Starting in Theater to Film

It originated from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual everywoman heroine of an getaway midlife comedy.

She turned into the star of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then successfully cast in the blockbuster movie adaptation. This closely followed the similar transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of The Film's Heroine

The film's protagonist is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is bored with life in her 40s in a tedious, uninspired nation with boring, dull people. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in Greece, she seizes it with both hands and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s ended to experience the genuine culture outside the tourist compound, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the mischievous native, the character Costas, acted with an striking mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s feeling. It earned huge chuckles in movie houses all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a lively career on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on the Doctor Who series, but she was not as supported by the cinema where there appeared not to be a author in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's adequate set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a UK evangelist and POW in Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the 2011 movie the Albert Nobbs film, Collins returned, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a servant-level maid.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental older-age films about seniors, 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 set in France film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a minor role) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant hinted at by the movie's title.

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