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In the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, witty, and cherubically sexy actress. She became a familiar figure on each side of the ocean thanks to the smash hit UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the period drama of its era.

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

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of greatness occurred on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice journey set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a cheerful, humorous, optimistic comedy with a superb part for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by usual male ideas about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the new debate about women's health and females refusing to accept to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

It originated from Collins performing the starring part of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

Collins became the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously chosen in the highly successful film version. This closely paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth wife from Liverpool who is bored with daily routine in her forties in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with boring, dull individuals. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the astonishment of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – remains once it’s finished to experience the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic escapade with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, acted with an striking moustache and accent by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s feeling. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he adores her skin lines and she comments to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively career on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the movies where there appeared not to be a writer in the caliber of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in Roland Joffé’s adequate Calcutta-set drama, 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 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in patronizing and syrupy silver-years films about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Fun

Director Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.