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In the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a recognisable figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable housemaid with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, played by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of greatness occurred on the big screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia!. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic comedy with a wonderful role for a mature female lead, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.

This iconic role foreshadowed the new debate about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Originating on Stage to Film

It originated from Collins playing the main character of a an era in Willy Russell’s stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the toast of London’s West End and Broadway and was then successfully selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely followed the similar path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a practical scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her forties in a boring, lacking creativity place with boring, predictable folk. So when she gets the chance at a free holiday in the Greek islands, she takes it with eagerness and – to the amazement of the boring UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture outside the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the roguish resident, Costas, portrayed with an outrageous facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s pondering. It earned loud laughter in movie houses all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she comments to us: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a active work on the stage and on the small screen, including parts on Dr Who, but she was less well served by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s decent located in Kolkata story, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 the Albert Nobbs film, Collins went back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a below-stairs domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in condescending and cloying elderly entertainments about the aged, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (though a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the film's name.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary time to shine.